Latent structure of a text

./english/41.txt:22:Friday evening: For the workshop “Governmental participation”, there then materialised, strangely enough, a Babels interpreter, even though the Greek hosts had explicitly granted that while the seminars had to be translated by BABELS/ALIS, the workshop organisers were allowed to bring their own collaborators. I feel demeaned by that, because it is a way to be able to say later on that I (or others in that situation) have not earned their fare. However, I then after all listened to part of the workshop: the speaker from the PCF stressed how the PCF was trying to create a broad alliance in view of the next elections and to also woo left-wingers from the PS, the Norwegian speaker emphasised the role of the trade unions in bringing about the left-wing government that they now have there, Jolanda Putz (from Italy and Germany) highlighted the victory over Berlusconi fascism as the basics for the new (somewhat more) left-wing government in Italy, my colleague Connie and the discussant from our partner party, the WASG (Electoral Initiative for Work and Social Justice), lost themselves in a futile dispute over petty details. I again went to the mike and asked the question whether it would not be possible to replace what Connie herself had called the “easily undermined” essentials of governmental participation by minimal standards to be enforced and not to be violated under any circumstances (for instance, no privatisations, defence of workers’ rights, no study fees etc.), as has been proposed in our German Left Party by Sahra Wagenknecht, Nele Hirsch and Tobias Pflüger et al., but the climate in the workshop was heavy, if you know what I want to say, and I switched to the seminar “Entry of Turkey into the EU”, where also my boss Michael Brie (rlf) had spoken. Here and in the seminar on war, I had the great revelation of the forum, namely the fact that the long-time bitter conflict between Turkey and Greece (and also Greece and Italy, due to the inheritance of fascism) really is a factor, which is why one felt tension again and again at the ESF.

./english/44.txt:17:The peoples of the whole world must join together in a unique stream of souls and minds to determine the conditions for a world free of conflicts, racism, exploitation and social discrimination.

./english/44.txt:82:- To find common processes of solidarity with the movements and the cities and towns of Colombia that are being repressed by the militarist government of Uribe which refuses to find a political solution to the social and armed conflict, and to support the processes of the Permanent Tribunal of the Towns so as to allow it to judge the policies of the multinationals and their degree of impunity in Colombia

./english/44.txt:229:- Opposing the growth of xenophobia and the provocative policy of the state authorities leading to ethnic conflicts; promoting internationalist alternatives on migration issues;

./english/62.txt:43:However, the differences between movement scholarship and activism are not exhausted along the lines of different forms of knowledge produced by them. There are also significant differences in terms of who are the actors that compose the constituencies of each one of them and of how – through which processes – such a social aggregation and representation is enacted. From this point of view, in principle, it is academia or the scientific community (Kuhn) the social subject, which validates the work of science, in general, and social movement studies, in particular. But it is known that science as social institution operates according to a set of pertinent norms, criteria of validity, ways to measure academic productivity and systems of reward, accreditation, promotion and success (Merton). As for the question of whether science is social accountable, this is indeed tantamount to posing the claim of the democratization of scientific expertise. Furthermore, up to the degree that the very bulk of scientific community is integrated into the system of higher education – through research conducted in universities – modern science tends not only to serve big business and the market but in many cases it becomes big business and it is marketized and privatized – for instance, in the lucrative areas of technological and medical research but not only. Consequently, the study of social movements appears to by drastically underfunded and, therefore, rather marginalized, when compared to many other social science topics. Thus, given the dominant trend of corporatization in higher education and politicized government funding, social movement scholars in academia would face many difficulties if they wanted to direct their research on studying social change and conflict for the empowerment of the powerless and the exposition of inequities in the status quo and inequalities in the distribution of resources (Croteau, Cancian). Hence, the very majority of social scientists tend to be restricted in analyses of a smoothly functioning society, mild policy reforms and studies of how to achieve an efficient social control and to manage social problems.

./english/62.txt:80:2) Doing that, I think it is useful to look at the world we are leaving in as inhabited by many ambivalences. I can’t here to develop this discourse, but I mean for example that it is important to recognize that this world of separations and crisis of institutions we are facing is ALSO the result of the social struggles we had in the past: i.e. the rejection of hierarchical and over-structured institutions in the 60s and 70s. It doesn’t mean at all we are leaving in a world shaped by these conflicts. But it means that to recover such a memory would help us to understand the unresolved contradictions the system is engaged to manage and to recognize that there are many more ambivalences and spaces of action we usually recognize.

./english/62.txt:91:3. This results in my position for an anarchical relation between researchers, activist researchers, activist and all the overlapping situations and perspectives. Our communication should be horizontal, open to conflict and not bound to any kind of naïve tutelage. What is missing in this session so far is that people not working in the academic area tell us what they await from research. Which questions should we research? I am very interested in suggestions, criticism or any other kind of input.

./english/147.txt:28:Tutte bianche is not, they tell us, a movement. It is an “instrument,” a form of direct action. The main elements are transparency, the symbolic and media value of messages launched by actions, and conflict aimed at consensus creation, and still further social disobedience. Everyone can enrich and add to this practice with respect to his or her own political experience.

./english/147.txt:38:Another movement inspired by the ideas of Italian Marxism, movimento antagonista, is more conservative. This movement, centered around unions and social centers, represents a continuity of the Marxist movement of the 1970s, “Autonomia Operaia.”Aantagonists promote the widening of social conflict, working in unions, struggle for the right of workers, anti-fascist campaigns, solidarity with Intifada, and anti-capitalist campaigns.

./english/162.txt:66:There is no nostalgia for a primitive life in the fact of quoting Mauss, nor any facile admiration for the "revolutionary fête." Things are much more complex. On the one hand, the contemporary quest for "direct action," for "direct democracy," finds an initial realization in the collective, cooperative production of these public events, which bring together all the rigorously separated aspects of modern social life. Indeed, the very aim of such events is to criticize certain fundamental separations, like the one that amputates any basic concern for life from the laws of monetary accumulation. But that doesn't mean that the event, the ecstatic convergence, is a total solution: instead it is a departure point for a fresh questioning of the social tie, at times when its deadly aspects become visible, as they are today. The protestors' claim, not just to the occupation but to the creation of public space, with all the conflicts it brings in its wake, offers society an occasion to theatricalize the real, in order to replay the meaning of abstractions that are no longer adequate to the needs and possibilities of life. The "total social fact" of the contemporary demonstration is, at its best, a chance to relearn and recreate a language for political debate, which isn't just about money, and doesn't only have "¥ € $" in its vocabulary. And the networked protests we are speaking of, including those of the peace movement in 2003, have produced the first chances to do this at the scale of the globalized economy and of global governance.

./english/176.txt:29:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 74In this line of inquiry, communication is perceived simply as a tool to mobilize resources. Resource mobilization theorists thus tend to disregard the influence of communication on mobilization techniques and on the constitution of relationships with allies and enemies. They also fail to acknowledge that by enabling certain types of decision-making and power distribution, communication has an effect on the internal structure and organization of a social movement (Ibid, 9). Collective actors are treated as ‘entities’ appearing in the public arena, while their internal communication, forms of organization and inner mechanisms remain relatively obscure. Therefore, the fact that social movement organizations are arenas of interaction and that different cultures of interaction shape different trajectories of mobilization seems to elude resource mobilization theory (Clemens and Minkoff 2004, 157). In the few cases where communication constitutes an object of study, the focus rests on external communication, especially the one taking place through the mass media, failing to account for the effects of more interpersonal communication. Identity: New Social Movements Theory Emerging in Europe as a response to identity and culture-driven social movements, new social movement theory focuses on ‘the content of movement ideology, the concerns motivating activists, and the arena in which collective action was focused – that is, cultural understandings, norms, and identities rather than material interests and economic distribution’ (Williams 2004, 92). According to new social movement theory, the strength of social movements rests on the production of alternative codes and frames of reference by ‘groups that are dispersed, fragmented, and submerged in everyday life’ (Melucci quoted in Diani 1992, 6). New social movement theorists perceive collective identity as a continuous, dynamic and self-reflexive process, preferring to use the term ‘identization’ which clearly captures its open-ended character (Melucci 1996, 77). According to Melucci, the concept can help us ‘reach the deep relational texture of the collective actor’ (Ibid, 80). This is because the process of ‘identization’ is defined by a multiplicity of interactions, negotiations and conflicts among movement participants, which render collective identity an essentially communicative construct. But even though the importance of communication is implicitly recognized, it is nonetheless not theorized or researched in detail. How do movement actors communicate in order to negotiate conflicts and reach agreements? How is this process influenced by the communication media, means and techniques that are being used? Such questions remain unanswered by new social movement theory, which thus falls short from Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 75aiding us elucidate the ‘black box’

./english/176.txt:45:ideologically diverse actors, as it is ‘conducive to forging (temporary) alliances and coalitions, both vertical and horizontal, across different issues’ (van de Donk et al. 2004, 19). But if it is not a shared ideology, then what is it that keeps these networks together and prevents their internal conflicts? According to Bennett, the answer rests on the loose and non-hierarchical modes of organizing adopted by these networks which ‘allow different political perspectives to coexist without the conflicts that such differences might create in more centralized coalitions’ (2004, 134). Therefore, the ease of linking or dropping out of these digital coalitions, their loose organizational structure, as well as the geographical dispersion of interpersonal activist relations, permit the ‘alter-globalization movement’ to foster ties of solidarity and collective identity in an international scale and among diverse participants, whose ideological differences may have hitherto been considered irreconcilable.

./english/192.txt:56:Hence the strains that became visible in London. We need to understand this when we prepare for Athens. The divisions in the British process tended to polarize between a coalition of significant social movements and a disruptive but socially weak autonomist fringe. But there are some four powerful forces that will need to be brought into the ESF - the Greek Social Forum, the Genoa 2001 Campaign, the Greek Communist Party, and the trade unions, whose leadership tend to be linked to PASOK. Only the first two have been involved in the ESF process, and all four have a history of mutual conflict. Bringing them together will be a big challenge for us all.

./english/193.txt:29:In contrast to post-structuralism, Holloway reformulates an essential notion of subjectivity outside of concrete social relations, assumes Joachim Hirsch, a prominent author writing on critical state theory.5 Instrumental power in Holloway’s understanding alienates the subject from its immediate subjectivity, ‘dehumanises’. He therefore misses Marx’s cognition that the ‘essence’ of human beings in reality is the ‘ensemble of social relations’. Moreover in contrasting instrumental and creative power Holloway on the one hand denounces all forms of intermediate institutions and representations, and on the other hand offers creativity as a possibility free of contradictions. That is bound to a romantic notion of original communism, of a nonalienated community. But it might be necessary in a complex society to develop some objectified forms of institutions for mediation (Versachlichung und Vermittlung) – not all forms of objectification necessarily lead to fetishism, although there is a danger. Without intermediation it is doubtful if such a society would be a free one. Developing creative anti-power in itself is a contradictory process: there is a need for alternatives beyond fragmented local struggles, for an understanding about theoretical, social and political concepts, goals and strategies. Such conflicts in the movement are also conflicts about power that could not be negated. But it is of great importance, Hirsch tells us, that Holloway has formulated a clear critique of all political concepts trying to fight the existing power relations with their own weapons. And he has brought back the notion of revolution into our thinking and acting.

./english/193.txt:34:However autonomy is not simply a thing one can take. Autonomy has to be worked out, in search of new forms of social relations and subjectivities. Nearly 90% of the locally active members are women. In organising these new social relations a need for desaprender (‘unlearning’) became evident in the face of entangled modes of domination reproduced in the community (for example machismo) and became part of self-educating processes. The movement gives itself space for collective reflection to work on conflicts. Partisans tried to get into the movement, but their old forms of clientalism and domination prevented a deeper influence. There is no disintegration of the movement in the face of a new government. Things have been institutionalised, networks of organisations been created, durability is the goal (not conjunctural actions) – but as this is a process from below (like in Chiapas as well), quiet, slow, changing subjectivities, it is not that visible in the media. The state is absent, apart from its repressive functions. The experience of exclusion was necessary for the movement. ‘Neoliberalism itself induced us to appropriate its promises, but without reintegrating into the system that excluded us.’ But repression is getting harder.7 ‘Will we always need someone to organise us our lives’, Jara asked, ‘some political party, or union, or government?’ For Holloway the piqueteros (although they do not like this expression, because it hides the everyday production and reproduction within the community) are the most prominent case of ‘urban zapatismo’, burning holes into the structure, against the existing, breaking with identities – it is the movement of non-identity. This is not a loss, there is nothing to be repressed, and it should not be a sacrifice but a pleasure.

./english/193.txt:41:Parties have a dual character: in the parliamentary system they are part of the state, therefore transforming social conflicts into institutionalised forms of consensus building, integrating oppositional forces into the ruling power structure. Radical parties could try to discredit the consensual uniformity, to extend the legal forms, to break with rules of the political field, but up to a specific degree they have to play the game. Nevertheless parties are also part of civil society and for a left radical party its strength depends essentially on the existence and organic connection to active social movements. Otherwise a left party is going to isolate itself, lost in the structures of parliamentary politics without the transformative power of movements as their mobile spine and vital space for imagination. Left radical parties have to reflect their privileged position in ruling political systems, divide power with social movements systematically, giving them institutional forms of influence over party decisions and (financial) means. The more successful they are, the more they have to ‘disempower’ themselves vis-à-vis the movements, recognising that they are not the centres of hegemonic counter-power, nor a privileged political form for social transformation. Such a party could be some kind of ‘institutional backbone’ (Spehr 2000), an infrastructure (Brand 2004) for social movements, creating and securing spaces for activities from below.

./english/199.txt:7:The third ESF has officially ended, but the barrage of attacks and counter-attacks around the autonomous actions and arrests continues to rage. The simmering conflict between the horizonal and verticals became fully visible when a group of activists from Beyond ESF, including the Wombles and many others, rushed the stage during an anti-Racism plenary Saturday night to denounce Ken Livingstone and the lack of democracy within the forum. Tensions grew after several activists were arrested on the way out, and resurfaced yet again when a highly respected Indymedia activist, who happened to have also played a key role in NOMAD and the broader ESF process, was dragged away by police after trying to make a statement following the march on Sunday afternoon. Things have since come to a boil as SWP members, the mayor's allies, and others dismiss such direct actions as violent, anti-democratic, and even racist, while their critics continue to defend the right to take direct action to publicly voice their concerns. Debates once pitting activists against mainstream politicians and bureaucrats in the WTO, World Bank, and IMF now rage within the very heart of the Global Justice Movement itself.

./english/199.txt:9:Before making too much of this situation, it is important to take a step back and reflect on the London ESF experience and the broader politics of autonomous space. Although perhaps more exaggerated this time around because of the nature of London's political culture- most notably the presence of SWP and Socialist Action- the tension between grassroots network-based movements and their more traditional organizational counterparts has been a constant since the beginning of the forums, and was present within earlier mass direct action mobilizations, including Seattle, as well. Intense struggles over political vision, tactics, and organizational form are not cause for alarm; indeed, they are constitutive of the convergence process that characterizes the forums and the broader movement from which they emerged. The important question is thus how to best manage such conflicts, rather than erase them entirely. And this is precisely where the politics of autonomous space has the most to offer.

./english/199.txt:11:Before describing my own experience in London , I should confess that I fully side with the horizontals. Not in the sense of an unrealistic utopia, but rather as a guiding vision, an ideal we should always aspire to. Horizontalism does not ignore informal hierarchies, but rather seeks mechanisms to control them, without reinscribing vertical structures into our formal organizational architectures. At the same time, horizontalism means always remaining open and flexible to diversity and difference- within certain limits, of course. Whereas those with divergent organizational practices may be welcome, those who support war and neoliberalism are not. I consider myself left libertarian and anti-capitalist, but I realize I form part of a much larger, complex, and contradictory whole. Building autonomous spaces, "separate, yet connected" as we used to say in Barcelona , becomes a way to manage conflict, respecting differences while sometimes acting together, and at other times taking critical action apart. Such a politics recognizes the importance of open space, but radically questions boundaries and clear demarcations. Rather than open space, we need to start thinking about multiple spaces, open not just internally, but also with respect to one another. Open space thus becomes networked space, physically manifest within and around the forum.

./english/199.txt:19:The overall feeling of the official forum this year did leave a lot to be desired. It was not so much the massive cathedral dimensions of the Palace, which can actually be quite stimulating, but the way the internal space was organized. It felt more like a massive trade fair, with political ideologies, study programs, and volunteer opportunities on offer, rather than a true space of dialogue, encounter, and exchange. Not that previous forums lived up to this ideal either, but this was perhaps the furthest away. Whether the forum's commercial feel was a direct result of the influence of the GLA or the SWP, I'll leave for others to decide. On a positive note, however, the bitter conflict within the organizing process was certainly a major factor in the proliferation of autonomous spaces. As for the panel I attended on the future of the ESF, there was a definite sense of having arrived at a Crossroads, that we are beginning to reproduce the same events and actions, year after year. I sensed nostalgia for the excitement and novelty of Genoa or Florence , and a distinct lack of ability to envision an alternative path. Perhaps it is time to let go, and reinvent the forum as something entirely new.

./english/199.txt:27:Despite the vast number of innovative discussions, projects, and initiatives that came out of the numerous autonomous spaces, the focus of most post-Forum discussions has returned to the conflict between horizontals and verticals, and in particular, the direct actions and arrests at the Saturday evening plenary and Sunday's march. Once again, this is not entirely negative. Indeed, the aim of direct action is precisely to make conflicts visible, provoke discomfort, and challenge commonly accepted ideas. Direct Action is transformative, both for the targets and participants alike. The important thing is what happens between now and the next ESF.

./english/199.txt:29:This isn't the first time an autonomous action has stirred up controversy among the ranks of forum organizers and participants. During the WSF in 2002 in Porto Alegre a large group of international activists from the Intergalactic Laboratory of Disobedience in the youth camp and Brazilian anarchists occupied the VIP room at the Catholic University . Although we clearly articulated that our action was not against the forum, but rather the top-down way it had been organized, Brazilian Organizing Committee members were livid. Luckily, our strategically situated allies were able to calm their nerves, and conflict with the police was avoided. Unfortunately, the same did not happen this time around.

./english/199.txt:35:What I am ultimately suggesting is that we renew our vision of the forum itself, recognizing that our movements are too diverse, even contradictory, to be contained within a single space, however open it may be. This does not mean abandoning the process, but rather building on the London experience to recast the forum as a network of interconnected, yet autonomous spaces converging across a single urban terrain at a particular point in time. Some spaces may be larger, and thus generate more gravity than others, while the boundaries are always blurry, diffuse, and permeable. Moreover, there will necessarily be contradiction and struggle, even within and between our networks. Such conflict should not be feared, but rather recognized as an integral part of the forum itself. In places like Prague and Genoa urban space was divided among diverse forms of direct action practice. In London we finally began to incorporate a similar logic on our own terms, without reacting to an enemy. As for we critics, rather than return to our bunkers to recreate an imagined state of pure horizontality, we would do better to recognize that mass movements are always conflictual and contradictory, that horizontalism is about learning to manage conflict without reintroducing formal centers of command. This is the lesson I learned in London , and why I support the politics of autonomous space.

./english/205.txt:27:No, it wasn't here – where the programme was politically almost homogeneous and empty or timid when it came to proposals – where it was at; the process had been successful in eliminating all conflict under a patina of forced consensus; the result wasn't convergence, but a feeling of back-slapping hollowness, enhanced by the uselessness of the big plenary format, with its ‘experts' and ‘leaders' preaching platitudes from a platform. Alexandra Palace was a dead geological stratus.

./english/205.txt:31:The exclusion of conflict from the inside caused its proliferation and concentration on the surroundings: London had not one, but various alternative spaces, almost a Forum in their own right. The proliferation was the consequence, to a certain extent, of the lack of public spaces; not surprisingly, three of these events took place in squatted social centres; that was also the ‘autonomous' solution for the accommodation crisis the official event still hadn't solved a week before the event (when the mayor rented the huge and useless Millennium Dome and made it available to all of those who paid £10 on top of the £30 registration fee).

./english/205.txt:50:A criticism that has been made (for a while in the so-called ‘global South', more recently in the ‘North') is that despite its principles of horizontality and refusal of representation, the period of the great demos belied a return of representational politics: they took place in the ‘North', amidst a young, white majority that claimed that ‘resistance is everywhere', but in the end of the day dealt with problems that were not close to their protagonists. This is, on the one hand, an oversight of the specificities of the European context – things like squats and social centres are not simply demands of ‘spoiled white brats', but a struggle of a youth that has been made precarious by the structural transformation of capitalism and the welfare reforms, and a struggle that (at least potentially) opens up to those of migrants, sans papiers and the unemployed. On the other hand, it does have an element of truth: the emphasis of these demos seemed always to be on struggles elsewhere, where the dark side of capital was more immediately visible, and they lacked a clearer definition of what the lines of conflict ‘at home' were. The resistance to capital is indeed everywhere, even in its core areas (and it's never enough to repeat that the core-periphery dynamic is repeated like a fractal all across the globe, also in those areas generically thought of as peripheral); one of the subjectivities formed in that period, however, is especially concerned with grassroots organizing processes in places like Asia and Latin America, in which structures such as the PGA European support group, for obvious material reasons, have been playing a relevant role in helping establish links, opening up discussions and helping with fundraising.

./english/205.txt:68:First of all, the inside/outside discussion, ore than ever, has proved to be empty. What was the ESF? Alexandra Palace or Beyond the ESF, Life Despite Capitalism, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination? In what seems to me to be the most correct sense, all of them. If Fora will be capable of expressing the diversity of the movement(s) they say to bring together and serve as a public arena, it'll be because of their capacity to incorporate conflict, not to subsume it under a semblance of false consensus. To that extent, the British process, with all its many flaws, points to a promising possibility in its recognition (tacit or explicit, in the form of inclusion in the official programme) of other spaces; the Forum as a constellation of related self-organized convergence spaces without a centre seems a lot more interesting than the present format.

./english/219.txt:33:We are fighting for a Europe that refuses war, a continent of international solidarity and ecologically sustainable society. We fight for disarmament, against nuclear weapons, and against US and NATO military bases. We support all those who refuse to serve in the military.We reject the privatisation of public services and common goods like water. We are fighting for human, social, economic, political and environmental rights to defeat and overcome the rule of the market, the logic of profit and the domination of the third world by debt. We refuse the use of “war on terrorism” to attack civil and democratic rights, and to criminalise dissent and social conflict.

./english/221.txt:7:We networkers and flextimers of Northern and Southern Europe, autonomously gathered at Middlesex University and determined to go beyond sclerotizing ESF, solemnly join minds and bodies in the present declaration of conflict against Europe 's governments and corporate bureaucracies.

./english/244.txt:27:Here it looks as though we are facing a double sociological problem of creating a process where the “analysis” of the situation of a social, political, cultural or gender conflict gets to be relevant enough to produce its own proposals of solutions to those conflicts. In a certain way we could say that the production of information from the social movements and from civil society involved in social transformation needs to be working at some points with networks that are practicing “activist research action”. But this article won't focus on this precise point that would be related with methodologies and contents shaping. We would rather here make a proposal to build more reflection around the way we produce and spread information related to the activities of our organizations and/or affinities groups.

./english/245.txt:32:There are certainly issues with email lists, and many examples of abuse of etiquette and of lists becoming zones of conflict. However, dealing with these challenges is all part of living in our modern inter-connected world and there are plenty of models available for structuring differing levels of email lists to ensure smooth running. Fear of loosing control is not an excuse for rejecting the benefits offered by using these technologies.

./english/245.txt:53:Obviously the area of press, media and public relations is one that can cause great concern where there is conflict over the wider political motivations and goals around the ESF. There are concerns over representation, not only regarding the whole ESF project, but also over the prominence given to different issues and campaigns, as well as to individual speakers. This is why policies or guidelines in these areas are essential. These issues were raised at the UK Organising Committee early in the year - recommendations were made that a series of press policies should be developed with a broad range of participants working in partnership with progressive media networks, and that these should include policies to ensure an equitable and clear access to the press, as well as a fair and transparent system for fielding and directing enquiries from the press.

./english/249.txt:11:At the same time, it has to be noticed that far fewer people participated in London than in Paris and Florence, and the level of conflict amongst our own ranks seemed to be far, far higher. The first fact can have lots of explanations: the ESF was more expensive, it was in the north, not in the Latin speaking south, some activists may experience ESF-fatigue, but also some might have stayed away because awareness of the problems of this year's event. Seen this way, the ESF can hardly be claimed a tremendous success, though it would also be an exaggeration to say it was a fiasco.

./english/252.txt:31:* the most conflict-oriented

./english/252.txt:43:c) DOMINANCE. The negative aspects of this political culture tend to elevate the power of the few (constantly at the microphone, often stating little new) over the many (sitting on their chairs, wanting the meeting to move ahead). This is because the will of the majority in the room almost never finds expression, while the shouters and the ones who eagerly run to the microphone are expressing themselves constantly. The lack of guidelines for the meeting also places vast powers with the chairpersons. When important issues are buried under endless, antagonistic debate, and time is running out, the room often ends up in the hands of the chair: we have the choice between accepting whatever “solution” he/she might propose on the verge of the meeting's breakdown, or having no decision at all. This role of the chairperson also tends to put him/her in conflict with the room, rather than in a truly mediating position where he/she builds up trust from all different groups and interests in the room.

./english/252.txt:57:2) By consensus, the meeting sets a time limit for speakers, at the start of each debate. The speakers are obliged to respect this time limit, and the chair is obliged to impose it equally for all. If necessary for clarification of conflicts that are keeping the meeting in a deadlock, the chair can allow a speaker extra time. This must be applied restrictively and stated clearly to the meeting.

./english/252.txt:67:7) The assembly should strive to appoint chairpersons that are perceived as somewhat “neutral” in the major conflicts within the assembly (as well as being up to the job, of course).

./english/269.txt:19:From this first tentative experience came the impulse to organize an ongoing research project. It is clear that we need tools for talking about and intervening in new kinds of work -this terrain of labor which often doesn’t even have a name - so we set out to map the territory, with one eye always set on the possibility of conflict. This is a bid for survival arising out of our own needs: networks to break solitude, words to talk about what is happening to us.

./english/269.txt:27:Instead of sitting still to settle all these doubts, we decided to set off and work them out on the move. We chose a method that would take us on a series of itineraries through the metropolitan circuits of feminized precarious work, leading each other through our quotidian environments, speaking in the first person, exchanging experiences, reflecting together. These derives through the city defy the division between work and life, production and reproduction, public and private, to trace the spatial-temporal continuum of existence, the double (or multiple) presence. More concretely: for a few months an open and changing group of us went almost every week on a wandering tour through the important spaces of daily life of women (ourselves, friends, close contacts) working in precarious and highly feminized sectors: language work (translations and teaching), domestic work, call-shops, sex work, food service, social assistance, media production. In order to structure our reflections a bit, we chose a few axes of particular and common interest to guide us: borders, mobility, income, the body, knowledge and relations, empresarial logic, conflict. Talking, reflecting, video camera and tape-recorder in hand, we went with the hope of communicating the experience and the hypotheses we might derive from it, taking our own communication seriously, not only as a tool of diffusion but as primary material for politics.

./english/269.txt:35:In addition to these basic hypotheses and a mountain of doubts, we have a few clues as to where to look next. First of all, and thanks to the workshops we conducted on ‘Globalized Care’ we have managed to work out a few points of attack. The crisis of care, or better, the political articulation of this fact, which from one or the other side of the sea effects all of us, is one of those points. We don’t think there is a simple way of posing the question, a single formula like a social salary, salaries for housewives, distribution of tasks, or anything like that. Any solutions will have to be combined. This is a submerged and many-legged conflict, involving immigration policy, the conception of social services, work conditions, family structure, affect… which we will have to take on as a whole but with attention to its specificities. And then there is our fascination with the world of sexwork which we have been encountering bit by bit, and which once again situates us in a complex map in which we also have to look at migration policy and labor rights, but also rights in the realm of the imaginary. There is a continuum here, which for the moment we are calling Care-Sex-Attention, and which encompasses much of the activity in all of the sectors we have investigated. Affect, its quantities and qualities, is at the center of a chain which connects places, circuits, families, populations, etc. These chains are producing phenomena and strategies as diverse as virtually arranged marriages, sex tourism, marriage as a means of passing along rights, the ethnification of sex and of care, the formation of multiple and transnational households.

./english/269.txt:43:Third, the necessity of constructing points of aggregation is clear. Curiously, our process of wandering the city has led us to value more the denied right to territorialize ourselves. If this territorialization cannot take place in a mobile and changing work place, then we will have to construct more open and diffuse spaces within this city-enterprise. The Laboratorio de Trabajadores that we are considering constructing would be an operative place/moment to come together with our conflicts, our resources (legal resources, work, information, mutual care and support, housing, etc.), our information and our sociability. To produce agitation and reflection. A good idea, and a difficult one: at the moment we are thinking about it, not only the practical aspects but particularly the capacity this might have to construct itself as an attractor, connector and mobilizer of sectors as different as domestic workers and telephone operators.

./english/269.txt:51:Fifth, we underline the importance of public utterances and visibility: if we want to break social atomization, we have to intervene with strength in the public sphere, circulate other utterances, produce massive events which place precariousness as a conflict upon the table, linking it to the questions of care and sexuality. There are ideas circulating, possibilities yet underdeveloped, for this kind of intervention both at a local and an international level, which we hope to pursue together with the many women and collectives with whom we have been in contact. For the moment, we detect three types of latent conflicts (or conflicts which exist but are invisible or individual): 1) generalized absenteeism from non-professional work (telemarketing, chain-store retail and service); 2) the demand for other contents and other forms within the precarious professions (nursing, communications) and; 3) the demand for recognition in the traditionally invisible sectors (domestic and sex work). The hybridization of these types must be taken into account, and our strategies be drawn from the resources, modalities and opportunities that these particular kinds of work provide. In this we have seen a few interesting experiments – from the rebel call-shop workers to the media workers who have used the tools they have at hand to project other messages – and in coordination we hope to generate more experiments.

./english/274.txt:36: The problem is that such an approach to envisioning radical alternatives is that it begins with abstract concepts and ideals as its founding basis, and then proceeds to try to fit life to those ideals. The danger of beginning with abstract values and goals as the basis for trying to plan social reality is that it’s very easy to get caught up in ideological conflicts through such a process, to get involved in conflicts over theoretical systems and interactions that may or may not occur when the new vision hits the pavement of actual existence. Conversely, such a process of going from abstractions can overlook very real pragmatic issues that can be glossed over in abstract models. And perhaps most important is that people don’t act like theoretical constructs – they act like people, whose behavior can never be fully described by any model of any kind. Among the areas which modern economics can be criticized for is that it is very good at creating abstract models of how an economy functions, but such do not describe (and really cannot describe) the actual functioning of the world.

./english/275.txt:64:The difference between this negotiated reading and the oppositional one, however, is one of theory: the person who negotiates their reading has a sense of how things are for them, or for people close to them, but does not generalize this, see that others are in a similar situation, identify with those others or draw more general conclusions about the nature of the world. The oppositional reading, in its ability to oppose the media message that strikes as such are bad, draws on a theoretical understanding of how the world is structured, of the general features of being an employee, and of the structural sources of conflict.32

./english/275.txt:98:Thirdly, the notion of experience put forward argues that we have to take into consideration the situatedness of experience. Here, yet another widening of the meaning of theory as an attempt to ‘go beyond’ occurs. If theoretical efforts actually succeed in bringing out the essential processes and relations that give rise to an experience of frustration and / or constraint, then it is likely that it will also make a contribution to advancing an understanding of the wider ramifications of a particular conflict in terms of how its dynamics are interrelated with non-particular, ie. global / universal dynamics. This, in turn, may help to articulate a political project that seeks to ‘go beyond’ the parameters of the local and specific. We shall elaborate on this point below.

./english/275.txt:117:Developing social movement practices and perspectives from militant particularisms towards more universal political projects entails ‘going beyond’ the specific and the local. Anchored in the assumption that local conflicts will tend to represent specific mediations of global conflictual processes, it entails an interrogation of the experience that has engendered this militant particularism in the first place, so as to unearth the dimensions of conflict that point towards such universal processes. This is what Harvey refers to as ‘the labour of translation’ and ‘abstraction’:

./english/275.txt:159:In our broader project, of which this forms a part, we are attempting a reading of Marxism as a theory of social movements (and a reading of social movements as organized human praxis). We see the practical implications of this as an analysis of social movements as coming not only ‘from below’, but also ‘from above’ – and the social world as being fundamentally constructed by the conflict between these two. This analysis, we believe, can help activists to see their work in a broader perspective, and crucially to identify possibilities which more conservative analyses refuse to consider.

./english/276.txt:17:Local rationality refers to the various oppositional ways of being and doing that people develop in their attempt to cope with experiences of frustrations, constraints and threats of and to their needs3. Militant particularisms are those forms of struggle that erupt when local rationalities are made more unitary and coherent as subaltern social groups deploy specific skills and knowledges in open confrontation with a dominant social group, in a particular place and at a particular time, in a particular conflict over a particular issue4. Campaigns are those forms of movement activity that emerge as militant particularisms communicate with and form links with each other, develop common strategies and identities across socio-spatial boundaries – i.e. the organization of a range of local responses to specific situations in ways that connect people across multiple such situations so as to challenge the construction of those situations. Social movement projects emerge from the development of a politics which connects single-issue campaigns to an ‘anti-systemic’5 politics. Social movement projects are thus defined by the following features: (a) they pose challenges to the social totality which (b) aim to control the self-production of society and (c) possess or are striving to develop the capacity for the kind of hegemony – i.e. giving direction to the skilled activity of different subaltern social groups – that would render (b) and thus (a) possible6.

./english/276.txt:41:The compulsion towards insurgent architecture, I submit, could also be a central aspiration and a fundamental knowledge interest in social movement research. As Barker and Cox (2002: 7) have pointed out, there is a schism dividing academic theorizing about social movements and activist theorizing for and within social movements. The former is dominated by a drive towards providing “explanations” of the “normal”, “scientific” type, and the debates within the discipline centre around the type of explanations required, and the theory it generates, is thus of a contemplative nature. Social movements are defined as objects of study to be subjected to observation, description and explanation; they are not conceived of as active processes with which people, engage, experience and transform (ibid.: 4, 5). The latter centres not on providing general scientific explanations, but on generating ‘case propositions of a very definite and practical nature’ (ibid.: 4), that is, movement theorizing produces practical and concrete proposals for action in a given, conflictual setting. Social movement practice is thus characterised by a form of knowledge produced in an attempt to answer questions emanating from an active engagement with a particular context, be it other movements or more generally the social world ‘within which those movements move’ (ibid.: 6). By positing insurgent architecture as a knowledge interest in social movement research this schism might be transcended. For social movement research this would entail putting the focus of attention of the movement process and thus on activists’ attempts to “join the dots” between the particular struggles they are directly involved in and the totality in which these struggles are embedded, and the development of practices and ideas that can match the joining of the dots. In short, social movement research as insurgent architecture would seek to develop theoretical knowledge that can enhance activists’ capacity for transcending militant particularisms, build campaigns, and develop social movement projects9.

./english/277.txt:6:The western Marxist tradition identifies the active engagement of human beings with their environment and with each other as a central ontological category. This physical, verbal and cognitive engagement is embodied through skill: the practical availability of what are often prediscursive modes of action, generated in collective learning processes such as conflict or alliance, materially sedimented in experience, practices, language, networks and so on, and thus continually subject to transformation or loss, but also constantly available as a resource for creative action. Movements, from above or below, are then different possible “proto-hegemonic” attempts at developing this potential from different starting-points and mobilising it around shared social projects and against others.

./english/277.txt:8:Strategies of research into movement contexts parallel these possible organising modes: given the diversity of participants’ orientations and of external interventions, there is necessarily a politics of research characterised by collusion with some participants’ knowledge interests and conflict with others. The paper draws on Gramsci’s conceptualisation of class consciousness to argue for a critical realism that extends the logic implicit in participants’ skilled activity to a more comprehensive standpoint, using the researchers’ own standpoint and knowledge interests critically as a part of this dialogue. The use of metaphor, illustration and other “hegemonising” strategies are geared to developing this two-way communication between different knowledge interests, which remains precarious unless it is developed into the coordination of shared activity.

./english/277.txt:32:The guiding thread which I think runs through these theories is a commitment to a view of history as nothing other than the product of human activity; and, more specifically, as the product of collective human action, articulated in conflicts which encompass the totality of society and in turn define that totality; conflicts which are not only grounded ultimately in the material activity of human beings but are at the same time conflicts over how that activity is to develop. In other words, I am arguing that western Marxism, so defined, is a theory of social movements, and one which elevates social movements to the central, perhaps the only, feature of the historical process and the social structure.

./english/277.txt:34:It could be argued that this in fact represents a correct reading of Marxism in general, but this is not central to my argument either way. It is sufficient to note what this perspective does, and does not, involve. Clearly it does not leave any space for an analysis which sees economic or social structure as anything other than the result of human practices, which would treat them as somehow extra-social. Similarly, it excludes the possibility of reifying power, the state, rationality, discourse etc. as pre- or supra-social. In other words, it is a thorough-going historicism and humanism which treats all features of the social world as in the last analysis the product of collective and conflictual human practices, or in other words of social movements.

./english/277.txt:38:Within the western Marxist tradition, two names in particular have been given to these practices, concepts which I am arguing represent the Marxist version of a theory of social movements. These concepts are social class, in particular class-for-itself or class culture, and hegemony. In one formulation, which can best be identified in Lukács and Touraine, social movements are class movements in the sense that they are essentially movements of one class only; they represent a subordinate class coming to consciousness of its own situation and interests and expressing that consciousness in conflict with a dominant class which has already achieved this level of self-awareness and self-organisation. In Gramsci’s formulation, however, social movements are class movements in the rather different sense that they are movements led by a single class or social formations representing that class; they entail an interaction between the way in which a given class organises its own activities and the way in which it organises the practices of other social classes. Can these positions be reconciled?

./english/277.txt:48:If we give the name of social movements to these collective practices, we are taking quite a different tack from conventional “American” theories of social movements in three respects at least5. This suggests, incidentally, that attempts to combine theories of “strategy” and “identity” (Cohen 1985, Melucci 1989, Diani 1992) are fundamentally flawed, as are attempts to compare them as if they were talking about the same thing (Scott 1990). The field identified by the two approaches is only partially comparable, if at all: the strategic approach assumes the stable continuation of existing social categories - something which is at least placed in question by the critical theory approach. The western Marxist analysis, however, sets itself the goal of understanding the totality of social conflict, placing any particular manifestation within this broader context and asking after its ability to transform social categories and the relations between them.

./english/277.txt:70:Using the category of “skill” to analyse this practical activity has the advantage of representing the engagement of human beings with their environment and with each other as something active, practical and creative, something which cannot be taken for granted or automatically reduced to some externally-given feature of the natural environment; to put this another way, it identifies a “mode of production” as an active, collective (and conflictual) way of doing things, something learnt and developed over time - and by implication something open to challenge.

./english/277.txt:76:(C) This points to the third element of the analysis, which is to see human activity as practical learning activity. If skill can be lost, it can also be developed; whether practically, in direct interaction with the natural and social world, or indirectly, for example by transmission of particular modes of organising social movements and of thinking about politics. The point of Marxist theory, and socialist organisations, within the workers’ movement is arguably precisely to enable such indirect learning, to avoid having to reinvent the wheel. Social movements are a privileged case of such learning, as Vester’s (1975) analysis of Thompson’s The making of the English working class seeks to establish. Vester argues that social movements represent “collective learning processes”, in which the elements Marx analyses as key to class conflict - an increasingly clearer self-understanding, a fuller grasp of social structure and historical process, and an increasingly adequate mode of organisation and struggle - are generated in the conflict with a movement’s opponents. The history of recent decades suggests that skill can be lost as well as developed. Hilary Wainwright’s (1994) analysis of the “politics of knowledge” of social movements also points, I think, in this direction, as does, from an earlier age, Banks’ analysis of social movements as a form of “social technology” (1972). As we shall shortly see, this is not all social movements are; but these points should be enough to establish an internal link from the bases of skilled activity to the articulation of social movements.

./english/277.txt:96:This ontology of skilled practical activity as the starting-point of human society, then, offers a more general and I think more fundamental starting-point for social movement research than one which assumes specific institutions and practices as defining; it directs attention precisely to the historical question of how skill is embodied in particular places at particular times; and it offers a direct connection to the other available starting-point for research, that of the conflictual social totality, to which I now turn.

./english/277.txt:106:If our categories are to be historical, if they are to be geared to movements as they develop and are eroded over the short and long timescales of conflict, they must be oriented to the whole history of a movement, not simply to its current appearance at a single point in time. But how is this to be done? The western Marxist tradition offers two related ways of thinking the problem. The first is that outlined by Lukács, in his discussion of “imputed class consciousness”. It is interesting to note, given the disfavour into which the concept has fallen, that Lukács himself thought that the concept was similar to Max Weber’s “ideal type”; in other words that it was oriented to asking what, all other things being equal, one could expect the interests and self-understanding of a particular social class to be: “class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ to a particular typical position in the process of production” (1971: 51; cf. note 11 on p. 81 for the reference to Weber). The problems with this point of view hardly need to be stressed; ah it is interesting that the obvious criticism - that this legitimates virtually any external imposition in the name of the “true” interests of the working class - is frequently made when these interests are identified as revolutionary; rather less frequently when social interests are identified in more conservative terms.

./english/277.txt:118:To do this is then also to collude with the knowledge interests of some participants and to conflict with that of others; just as activists do, in other words, so researchers find themselves in practice agreeing to a greater or lesser extent with the way some participants see the movement, and organising their research accordingly, and disagreeing to a greater or lesser extent with other views, and organising the research in ways which tend to exclude these other definitions - of the boundaries of the movement, for example. This is, I think, inevitable if the research process is to involve any identification of an object of research, if it is to involve any method of engaging with that object, and if it is to result in any analysis whatsoever. Yet if this is the case, it becomes crucial to be able to give a clear account of the politics of a specific research process.

./english/277.txt:129:This discussion of the purposes of research obviously ties into the question of how research is done. This is rather more familiar ground in discussions of reflexivity, and I only want to make two points. The first is to add to the discussion of research methods, and the kinds of social and power relations these set up between researchers and participants, a discussion of the conditions for the employment of these research methods. The application of particular “methods” always takes place in a context of power and inequality; in the case of a social movement, typically one of conflict as well. What situation does the researcher have to be in to use particular methods? I want to consider two examples, from opposite ends of the spectrum. In one case, the use of in-depth interviews with members of radical political and social groups, it is clear that to get anything more than “official stories” or even blank refusals a reasonable level of trust is needed.

./english/278.txt:21:A third approach has simply linked class-consciousness; or rather the lack of it, to the increasing segmentation of the work force that follows from changes in the structure of the job market. What distinguishes different groups of workers from each other, it is held, has become greater than what they have in common, establishing a variety of occupation or sector consciousnesses in place of class consciousness (Lockwood, 1975). This account is sufficiently materialist and stucturalist to attract the support of some radicals (Edwards, 1979), but the class consciousness that is undermined never gets the same attention as what undermines it. Hence, we are in no position to estimate the pull of conflicting forces on workers' consciousness either now or in the future.

./english/278.txt:125:There are, of course, serious dangers of distortion in conducting the kind of interviews and interventions I have called for, especially those held in less conflictual situations. Here I can only sketch the most important of these. What does one do, for example, with the people who choose to remain silent, a problem that grows of necessity with the size of the group? In part, and where this is feasible, this can be dealt with by asking everyone for their opinion. Beyond this, one must be attentive to various signs and noises that show how people feel about what is being said and done. Enthusiasm, delight, anger, disgust, disappointment, and resignation are all relatively easy to detect, but the bulk of what constitutes class consciousness remains beyond our perceptual reach. An equally serious problem is that people tend to be more spontaneous and truthful in responding to questions when they are dealing with pressing life problems.

./english/282.txt:79:The activist, by contrast, qua organic intellectual, carries out directive and theoretical activity on behalf of subordinate classes and groups. These classes do not control institutions, resources and symbols in the same way as dominant groups. Though they are constantly creating such forms of self-expression and struggle, these forms are constantly being combated and colonized by the dominant. Organic intellectuals therefore find themselves constantly creating - not ex nihilo, but from social materials typically controlled or contested from above. Since the primary purpose is to create what is not yet in existence (hence, once again, movement), their modes of theorizing are those geared to engagement, conflict, and (importantly) discovery.

./english/282.txt:95:As to how people become movement intellectuals, acquire the necessary skills and confidence, present themselves, and become accepted in the role, we can only offer some scattered suggestions. Gaining the 'right to speak' may derive from a claim to represent a specific 'community' or organization, from demonstrated commitment to a cause, from being accredited by the media or from authorship of a well-known book, etc. Nancy Naples (1998a) discusses the mentoring of potential leaders, with 'old hands' proposing them as speakers, encouraging them to put themselves forward for particular positions, introducing them to informal networks of activists, apprenticing them, giving them 'the real story' behind given conflicts, interpreting statements for them and so forth. The birth of new movement organizations may provide opportunities for individuals who were excluded from leadership in older ones: Ella Baker played foundational role in SNCC after battling against the practical sexism of the Baptist ministers who headed the SCLC; militant shop stewards may play powerful roles in 'unofficial' union movements in opposition to existing union bureaucracies.

./english/282.txt:102:The relationship between activist and academic theorizing is not simply that of a static contrast. As social processes, they are closely intertwined, in processes of colonization and resistance which operate in both directions. 'Theory', in the sense of the symbolic languages generated by these processes, is then affected in important ways both by the primary social locations of activist and academic theorizing and by the processes of (conflictual) dialogue which occur between them.

./english/282.txt:171:To recognize this history would mean not only going into far greater depth in the history of ideas than one could expect of undergraduates - or political scientists! - it would also mean dethroning of purely cognitive analysis and recognizing that these theoretical struggles were organized not in terms of the clash of generic propositions but of conflicts over practical choices facing activists and movements.

./english/282.txt:215:Contra the Michels - Weber assumption of an essential conflict between ends and means, we might suggest that the abstraction of a cosmological and moral dimension from other elements of movement activity is related to the situation of a movement seeking to co-opt (or be co-opted by) the state. In such a situation, a sharp division may occur between an increasingly instrumental technology of 'organization' and the appeal to the 'mediation' of the state - whether by an appeal to 'enlightened despots' or 'the public'.

./english/282.txt:219:In more active movements, rather than 'cosmology' determining 'action', people often radicalize their understanding of how the world works through the process of conflict with adversaries and the attempt to convince the unconvinced; the 'programme' similarly is something which is often implicit in the choice of particular battles over others, the formation of particular alliances, and the creation of alternative social relations - what Fantasia (1988) has memorably called 'cultures of solidarity'.

./english/282.txt:226:There is perhaps also a deeper criticism to be made: that it is itself a historical and sociological question whether it makes sense to distinguish a separate dimension of the cognitive praxis of movements from the rest of life. Lichterman (1996), contrasting the largely white and middle-class US Greens with black and Latina anti-toxics campaigners, noted that the former in effect constituted and understood themselves as an intentional community', alienated from their own social background and in conflict with important aspects of its assumptions. By contrast, the latter understood themselves as part of broader ethnic (and class) communities: they did not, that is, necessarily separate the thought processes involved in 'being activists' from those involved in e.g. 'being black'.

./english/282.txt:228:Similarly, Irish working-class community organizers may refuse the term 'activist' as referring to something alien to the everyday life and culture of the communities they see themselves as part of - while nevertheless being involved in processes of discussion, disagreement, conflict and education within those communities. In these cases, people are involved in a struggle over the meaning of everyday culture, and may set limits on the extent to which movement discourses are allowed to develop independently.

./english/282.txt:245:Firstly, there is a very explicit original purpose; according to the intro the document mushroomed from the need to argue that 'anarcho-capitalists' ('libertarians' in the American sense of the word) are not true anarchists at all, and that anarchism necessarily involves a rejection of capitalism. Here is then a struggle over movement boundaries, located primarily on the Internet, where these two kinds of 'anarchists' are most likely to conflict (since anarcho-capitalists are unlikely to be found in the same struggles as anti-capitalist anarchists).

./english/282.txt:247:A second kind of purpose is evidently to distinguish anarchists from Marxists, in particular Trotskyists, who in Britain and Ireland at least are often the closest 'competitors' for anarchist activists - both sharing an orientation towards radical struggle, but competing for members and the attention of other activists, conflicting over the direction of campaigns (in e.g. arguments over the role of the state and violence), and so on. These, then, are conflicts which are in a sense internal to movements (and the FAQ argues that both Marxism and anarchism are to be understood in the context of working-class opposition to capitalism).

./english/282.txt:249:This involves a rather different kind of argument and material: not to argue that Marxists are not really on the left, but more along the lines of 'where have Marxists and anarchists come into conflict?', with much discussion of Kronstadt, Makhno, Spain, etc. From the way this is presented, it makes most sense as training material for newcomers: a sense of a history of opposition, long-standing grievances, reasons why Marxists shouldn't be trusted, etc. Interestingly, it is not primarily posed as a cosmological argument; in fact the section of the FAQ devoted to analyzing the theoretical disputes is still in progress. The arguments are those designed to convince radically-minded activists to throw in their lot with anarchists rather than Trotskyists, rather than to convince postgraduates to align themselves with anarchist theory.

./english/282.txt:258:Some of the material in the FAQ is oriented towards 'movement insiders', whether as newcomers (the history of conflict with Marxists) or those already involved (the different branches of 'legitimate' anarchism); some are meant as fodder for arguments with 'movement opponents' (arguments against anarcho-capitalism) or with the uncommitted (arguments about the viability of anarchist societies etc.).

./english/283.txt:15:In this contribution, we offer some notes taken from a long meeting exploring relationships between academia and activism. The notes are ordered from multiple flipcharts and include some direct quotes (in italics) from these charts to provide something of the dynamic flavour of the discussion. Our intention is multiplicitous – to use current jargon. It is to make a note of one ephemeral attempt at conversation between activists and academics, in a context of some anti-intellectualism in the UK political scene. And it is to highlight the conflict that can emerge in such discussion across boundaries, as insecurities morph into accusations and attack. It is to emphasise that opening up to each other requires safety and softness, although defensiveness and deepened identities frequently are what arise instead. And it is to nevertheless affirm a challenge to keep placing ‘ourselves’ in the presence of different views; to keep learning and unlearning, in our attempts to disperse boundaries and enclosures, conceptual and otherwise.

./english/290.txt:66:We say communicative because these three elements (sex, attention, and care) create relationships, they are modes of corporeal communication. But why call it a continuum? On one hand, in order to emphasize precisely the elements of continuity that exist under the stratification, outside of frozen images, in concrete and everyday practices, which are always more complex and fluid than any icon. In the way, we seek to challenge the supposed naturalness of those strata and to open transversal possibilities of alliance and conflict. As we said in another place: "capital fragments the social in order to extract value, we join together in order to elevate it and displace it toward other places".[7]

./english/290.txt:128:Because care is not a domestic question but rather a public matter and generator of conflict.

./english/291.txt:25:In the day to day, precarity is a synonym for some laboral and vital realities that are increasingly destructured: fragmented spaces, hyper intensified and saturated times, the impossibility of undertaking middle- to long-term project, inconsistency of commitments of any kind of indolence and vulnerability of some bodies submitted to the stressful rhythm of the precarious clock. Some bodies debiliated by the inversion of the relation of forces (now on the side of capital), by the difficulties of building bonds of solidarity and mutual aid, by the current obstacles for organizing conflicts in the new geographies of mobilities and the constant mutations where the only constant is change.

./english/291.txt:41:The social context that we live in today is the network-society. The factory has overflowed and has invaded the social, changing it into the principal lever of production. The wave of struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, on one hand, and the saturation of markets, along with the high levels of competition that introduced the process of globalization, on the other, obligated firms to develop techniques and technologies to make themselves more mobile and flexible and also more resistant to conflictivity and crisis: their survival depended, on one hand, on their capacity to detext (and take advantage of) the politico-institutional and social conditions and of the supply of most optimum raw materials, software, and machinery and work force; on the other hand firms' survival depended on their ability to respond within very brief time spans to oscilations of demand, thus in order to create (with a whole set of identification of needs/desires/forms of life and production of signs) the demand for a product even before manufacturing it. The key thus was in the multiplication of contacts and in a flexible and network organization that allowed a maximum fluidification of the circulation of information about local and international markets and an immediate production response to this information. In this manner, externalization, dislocalization and flexibilization became the slogan and communicative and relational work became the essential pivot, the active interface, of this ever more networked production.

./english/291.txt:75:In general, in the laboral terrain, more useful typologies attempt to think from the point of view of expressions of unrest and rebellioning the distinct positions. Thus, we can see that, in jobs with a repetitive content (telemarking, cleaning, textile workshops), the subjective implication with the task performed is zero and this leads to forms of conflict of pure refusal: generalized absenteeism, dropout-ism, sabotage... In telemarketing, for example, absenteeism is the number one problem for the departments of human resources, which rack their brains in search of strategies to deal with it: from the relocation to the old colonies of the mother firm (Marruecos and Argentina in the case of Spanish firms) to the contracting of more blackmailed subjects (women heads of household between 40 and 50 years of age) or the attempt to inculcate loyalty among the workforce, changing telemarketing to one of the branches of professional education. On the other hand, in jobs where the content is of the vocational/professional type (from nursing to informatics, to social work to research) and, as such, the subjective implication with the task performed is high, conflict is expressed as critique: of the organization of labor, of the logic that articulates it, of the ends toward which it is structured... This can be seen very clearly in the mobilizations of nurses in France in the 90s, in the present struggles of the intermittents in the media also in France or in the free software impelled by programmers all over the world in the face of the logic of proprietary software of the big corporations. Finally, in those jobs where the content is directly invisibilized and/or stigmatized (the most paradigmatic examples are cleaning work, home care, and sexual work, especially - but not only - street prostitution), conflict manifests as a demand for dignity and the recognition of the social value of what is done. "Fucking, fucking it's a service to the community" chant the whores of Montera street in their demonstrations against the constant police harrassment and the criminalizing plans of the mayor of the city of Madrid.

./english/291.txt:79:However, one and the other typology shares a same problem: the location of the point of view exclusively in the laboral terrain turns our perspective myopic to the micro and macro conflictivities that are given in and against the precarization of existence in the passage between work and non-work, generating short circuits in the intricate system of connections of the network society.

./english/291.txt:89:Since 1886 the first of May has been the international day of commemoration (except in the US) of the "Chicago Martyrs" (worker leaders condemned to the gallows in the context of the general strikes for the eight hour day in the US) and of expression of the demands and struggles of that great historical and strongly identitarian subject, the proletariat, inexorably united in a period of capitalism, industrial capitalism, to some modes of organization, the great strikes and the mass unions, and to some places of mobilization, the factories. But to the degree that capitalism has been changing its forms of exploitation in order to dodge the workers conflicts and reappropriate their demands, passing from industrial capitalism to fordism and, from this, to the present postfordist mode of production, this date has been losing meaning until it became of holiday (for some) and completely devoid of content for almost everyone.

./english/291.txt:111:But, look, this does not mean that the laboral can no longer be a place (among others) of conflict, nor that the teachings of the worker movement cannot be useful. It means only that the battle inside and against precarization cannot be restricted to the laboral. It means that it is necessary to invent forms of alliance, of organization, and everyday struggle in the passage between labor and non-labor, which is the passage that we inhabit.

./english/293.txt:184:We dedicated several meetings to defining the axes of our approach, which later, in the course of the drifts, would take more shape. The axes which came out of our debates were informed by our experiences of time (stress, excess, saturation, the impossibility of planning, instability…), of space (mobility, life territories, borders, displacements, sedentarism…), of income (badly paid work, lack of resources, loans from friends and families with guaranteed work, limited access to public services and misappropriation of various cards…), of care and relations (communities of work, affect, sociability), of conflict (possibilities and processes of struggle…), of hierarchies (in many cases diffuse and painful), of risk (insecurity, vulnerability) and of the body (discipline, abuse, sporadic care, compulsive sexuality…). After various drifts, the axes took shape and meaning beyond our own initial intuitions.

./english/293.txt:188:We finalized the axes thus: (1) mobility, (2) border territories, (3) corporealities, (4) knowledges and relations, (5) empresarial logic, (6) income and (7) conflict. The axes do not cover all experience but they do help to interpret it. What follow are some partial and yet-insufficient reflections following our first five drifts. The pages below are a whirlwind of descriptions, notes and testimonies which point towards incipient hypotheses, encounters with the form-text for talking about the form-drift, and utterances which attempt to express the joy and the insatisfaction which we feel before what are only barely our first stuttering efforts: a sort of balance of the first phase of the project.

./english/293.txt:343:The fact that sociability exceeds and escapes from the the more rigid structures of work is a well known reality, the most interesting concretion of which we find in parks, where fellow migrants meet and work out all kinds of contacts. The fragmentation of the houses where they work, the invisibility of residency papers and the anonymity of being foreign are recomposed in a public space which resists the postmodern phenomenon of the “no place.” And we think: if a particular space should exist for the struggle against precariousness, this would be the city in its full extension; this park, that bar, the stairway of the building, the whole block, the metro, the crosswalks, the doorways, the empty lots… This gives us important clues for thinking about conflict from a spatial continuum which unfolds itself in daily life, not limited to work (how, for example, to create conflict from within the isolation of the domestic worker? Can we follow up on this? Meet in other spaces? Meddle?), and in the figures and positions which incarnate these situated flows (the occasional companions in the call-center? The fellow users of the internet café, the discount supermarket, the bus number 36?).

./english/293.txt:417:CONFLICT

./english/293.txt:421:For us this investigation is, above all, a way of thinking together towards collective action, an effort to locate the scattered sites of conflict and know how to name them, to inaugurate other previously nonexistent ones along with those we already experience: in the process of job-seeking, in the job-interview (that grand machine of daily humiliation!), in networks, in shopping centers, on the telephone, in the park, in social centers… After this first cycle of drifts, whose itineraries and reflections we try to collect in this text from the June 20th strike to the more recent and frustrated strike against the war in Iraq on April 10th, we have thrown out two questions, in first and in second person: “What is your war? What is your strike?”.[36]

./english/293.txt:425:The primary objective of the Laboratorio de Trabajadoras was to create a space of permanent communication which would not be restricted by work-place nor limited to the strictly work-related -as if this could be separated from other aspects of life- and that would not be restricted to the singularity of this or that company, this or that specific conflict, some particular demand, but that could be reinvented as a practice, contaminating and provoking chain reactions. A laboratory which would permit us to be on top of events and improvise coordinated movements of support and of rebellion (to intervene in the firing or the abuse of a live-in domestic worker, to participate in the strikes and struggles of health workers, telemarketers…).

./english/293.txt:429:As much in the course of the drifts as afterwards in the two workshops of Globalized Care, we have only just begun to go over some of the memorable recent experiences of struggle: the janitor’s strike in Ramón y Cajal Hospital, the struggle of the Qualytel telephone operators, and other gestures, bursts, protests and budding processes of uprising. For some the encounter with the janitors in our brief visit to the hospital was strange, alien: alien to us because we saw them in a localized conflict, still influenced by unions like CCOO[37] (with which the workers of the Eurolimp-Ferrovial contract in Ramon y Cajal had had such confrontations in order to maintain their autonomy and their grassroots structure), in a conflict in which the question of precariousness resides basically in the increasing loss of rights, in the disappearance of the workers’ functions in order to intensify their activity, and in the absolute repression of any and all burst of protest.[38] But we immediately recognized the intimacy of the relationship they sought with the patients and their families and with other social groups outside of the realm of the unions, and we identified with their discourse about care as something related to citizenship and their criticism of the privatization of health care.

./english/299.txt:29:Our comings and goings had already illuminated a series of problems, as much on the theoretical level ≠ the concept itself of precariousness, for example ≠ and on the methodological level ≠ how shall we approach each other? How, being sometimes so close and sometimes so far? ≠ as in the question of how to generate conflict in environments which are invisible, fragile, privateä or in environments which are more or less codified, such as the ones that opened up in the heat of the mobilizations during the invasion of Iraq[2]ä or in diffuse environments like shopping malls, department stores, public transportation, etc. We had important testimonies, many of them recorded and transcribed, and we had generated a series of tools, modest though they may be, such as the picket-survey, the Precarias mailing list, the accounts from the field and, in general, a practice of meticulous documentation with the intention of preserving and giving form to our reflections and our itineraries. The experiential knowledge that we proposed through the ådriftsπ had set us on track and had permitted us to expand our point of view almost vertiginously. On the other hand, the consolidation of the network of contacts that had formed around the project of the drifts and the invitation to strike ≠ the proto- Laboratory of Women Workers ≠ was still in the bud, as were many of the utterances, slogans and hypotheses that we hoped to produce. A few important drifts, in particular that of media production and that of sex work still had not been undertaken for various reasons, and we did not want to leave them up in the air.

./english/299.txt:37:So we designed what would be this second phase and we spoke of giving continuity to this project in three different but not unrelated ways: (1) a second cycle of drifts, (2) a series of workshops of collective reflection open to more people and (3) some interventions that would allow us to investigate possible forms of conflict.

./english/299.txt:43:The workshops were a bid for a more leisurely encounter, as well as a means of reaffirming the relationships we were creating and a call to collective delirium, albeit planned. The workshops were born, in some way, from the contacts or necessities which had come up throughout the drifts: why are we talking about women? What is in question in this so-called crisis of care? Some of the workshops went rather quietly by, others, in particular the ≥Workshops on Globalized Care≤ really worked and permitted us to delve deeper into a complex field such as that of the conditions in which reproduction is realized on a global scale. Last, the thorny question of conflict, riddled more by intuitions than anything else, was still there, irreverent, winking at us from the corner. Infiltration, (industrial?) espionage, transvestitism, the rebellion of the machines, faulty labeling[6] and, of course, the ≥reclaim the streets≤ or the mobile surveying device all showed themselves to be pale hints of the possible.

./english/299.txt:185:The reflections arising from this workshop are presented in a text included in this volume,[29] so we will procure that these pages serve just as a invitation to situate ourselves in the place where this investigation began, at a particular crossroads: Crisis? Conflict? Transit?

./english/299.txt:197:To some extent our interest in globalized care is the same as that which motivates the whole institutional topic of ≥reconciliation of work and family life,≤ although we depart from different premises and move toward different conclusions.[30] For the moment we are going to call this a ≥crisis≤: the mainstream reproductive scheme presently comes into conflict on one side with the pressure exerted by the deregulation of work (both masculine and feminine) and the lack of public services and, on the other, with the expectations that access to education, more or less stable employment, sexual self-determination and, in general, feminismπs position on the liberation of women has generated since the 1970s.[31]

./english/299.txt:229:As we began to talk about these questions we came up against the situation of some of us, migrants in domestic service and in care work. In ≥First Stutterings≤ we refer to the transfer of much reproductive work to migrants. This has various consequences which arise from one problem: reproductive work has not been distributed and the conditions of employment make the work of ånativeπ women more difficult. That homes do not have ≥wives≤ does not mean that things do not have to get done; what is more, they say that in modern homes despite or precisely because of all kinds of technological advances the amount of work is greater. Although income frequently is not especially high, many heterosexual (and homosexual, we imagine) couples avoid the conflict: they contract someone (by the hour) and they are even. If there are children and two salaries, even if the salaries are precarious and/or flexible, the solution, besides the grandmother, is clear. This gives rise to a ≥demand≤, a niche for precarious womenπs work which corresponds perfectly to the ≥supply≤: that of migrant women who are looking for work or life alternatives in the centers of global capitalism and who cannot opt for other jobs.[37] So there we have the pull and the push. And, from our point of view, what should be insisted upon is the pull: the structure of the Spanish labor market with its explosion of submerged work, underemployment and unemployment. This is especially the case now that, under the neoliberal lens, the impoverishment of the Third World is increasingly regarded as an incapacity to develop and thus something that countries should take care of themselves.

./english/299.txt:259:All the questions derived from this global readjustment are interesting to us. Not as a conflict between women or from a perspective of blame (the liberation of some at the price of oppression of others), a vision which can be perceived in some feminist statements: those which have interpreted postcolonial criticism as an intonation of mea culpa, appealing in the end to individual goodwill. Nor, in the opposite direction, do we see this readjustment as an engine driving the anxiety and the vengeance of real legitimate caretakers against sadistic foreigners: see the recent scandal which the press made about the abuse by an Ecuadorian live-in of the blond twins of an absent white mother. Rather we are interested in these questions as a dynamic which contributes to the reconfiguration of households, families, the sense of intimacy and of the private, the ways of loving, of caring and of managing affect. They interest us also in their connection with sexuality, with an affective continuum which has always been present and which distributes functions as wife, lover, caretaker, sexual servant, companion, mother, contracted wife, etc. They interest us, finally, because the capacity to make alliances and the capacity of the most vulnerable sectors of women to demand negotiation and introduce conflict is what will assure better conditions for all. It is a question of rooting out, once and for all, the idea of loyal or disloyal competition, the clauses of national priority as an excuse to nurture precarization and ethnification, and sexual difference as an argument for ≥specialization≤ in the lowest ranks. Capital fragments the social in order to subtract value, we aggregate to elevate it and to move it into other places. Without a doubt, we find ourselves in a force field, a field in which the symbolic is being created and life practices determined. Its time to intervene. In the end, in one way or another, we are talking about the daily life of each and every one of us.

./english/299.txt:267:And in terms of strategyä what can we say? We have discussed long and hard, this way and that. Really, as a friend from the Feminist Assembly of Madrid says, we have already been thinking this over for a long time, this question of putting life, the sustainability of life, in the center, although we have not yet come upon the solutions or better, the ways, in which to put this invisible conflict into the public space.[40] Perhaps we are getting close. Quantify, valorize, visibilize, withdraw, mercantilize, abolish, industrialize, share, salarize the social economy, reconcile, fight for a domestic social salaryä

./english/299.txt:271:The scenario we are sketching here evidently has little to do with policies of åreconciliationπ which see institutional feminism and the measures designed in its name as tools forming part of the great narrative of womenπs progressive liberation. Our analysis is different. It is primarily global, in the sense that it contemplates the reality of as many women as possible ≠ housewives, workers, from both shores, paid or not, married or not, legal or illegalized, in unions which are recognized or those which are not, etc. ≠ as a whole and in relation, as ambiguous and conflictive as this may be. It is worthless for us to talk about reconciliation or even of valorization if we do not also talk about distribution or division, or better yet, of cooperation and conciliation for all in fair conditions. Worthless if when we speak of the home we do not also speak of the precarization of existence and of employment and vice versa. As some critical positions have indicated, the debate on the reconciliation of home and work departs from inadequate premises (it is women who have to do the reconciling) and either avoids crucial questions (such as that of migrant work, that of the legal forms of union and of citizenship, that of precarious and feminine conditions of work) or directs conflicts towards positions of pacification in which inequalities are justified.

./english/299.txt:279:The strategy of visibilizing, valorizing and even quantifying[42] is fundamental, but to this we must add the analysis of precarious work and migration, as until very recently these efforts were based upon the model of a ≥typical≤ (and ≥native≤) woman, home and employment. These analyses are not always accompanied by reflections which permit a politicization of our lives, which favor the articulation of knowledges, change and collective conflict. The so-called social economy ≠ the third sector ≠ is sometimes a perversely perfect partner to the opportunities for accumulation offered by the (no longer so) ≥new sites of employment≤ and the recent forms of subcontracting. This is accentuated even more in the case of women. The idea of a social salary, about which we spoke in the national feminist encounter in Cordoba in 2000 and in other meetings, is an opportunity to adjust the debates about work and life. It may, however, leave untouched the question of value, salary and conditions (experienced by domestic employees) and the limits of cooperation (which all of us experience in our homes).

./english/299.txt:287:The struggles of caretakers ≠ of housewives in impoverished countries, immigrants, social workers ≠ are still just beginning, and the burgeoning experiences point to an aggregation that could interrupt the atomization and precarization of personal services, the degradation of the public and the anguish and juggling-acts required by family commitments.[43] The struggles of (under)cared-for people, which have been significantly organized in some countries of the Third World (and have barely existed in Europe, with the possible exception of France), represent the other side of the same problems: resources, quality and cooperation. In this sense, the conflicts produced by migrants and those who work in questions of care, conflicts grounded in work but above all in citizenship, in the imaginary and in lifestyle, demand a greater degree of elaboration and confluence.

./english/300.txt:14:These interactions between social spheres though don’t occur out of the blue. One of the main arguments of this essay is that the impetus for the combination of radical geography and participatory research (or even similar projects such as popular education) comes from ‘society’ in periods of heightened conflictuality and mobilization. In a more general sense, as Harvey puts it: “The history of our discipline cannot be understood independently of the history of the society in which the practices of geography are embedded… The difficulties and alternatives geographers now face are likewise rooted in conflictual processes of societal transformation” (Harvey 2001; p.108).

./english/300.txt:53:It seems then, that while intellectual complexity developed, even to the point of having multiple specialties and foci within critical geography, the emphasis on ‘participation’ seems to have dissipated. At times, one can even find comments from the period in the mid and late seventies that could be construed if not as critiques of the participation model in research, then as calls for a change in emphasis (Peet and Harvey 1974; p. iv & Breitbart and Peet in Peet 1979; p. 15). In keeping with one of the themes of this paper dealing with the influence of social mobilization on the academy, it is important to note that it is during this time period that a general demobilization of society is beginning to take hold. While many thousands had been radicalized by the 60’s and early seventies, the same mass mobilizations around any multiplicity of issues that had occurred then were becoming more and more distant by the mid-late seventies. This was also the period when the ‘militaristic logic’ emerged in many small radical groups. Groups such as the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army in the U.S. got involved in very short-lived armed conflicts with the state having misread the historical moment and chosen a strategy were these groups were a thousand times the weaker. In this ambiance it becomes easier to explain that while the development of radical geography pushed forward the ‘wall’ between the academy and more general activism re-hardened [1].

./english/300.txt:67:What is interesting to note about this discussion is that it’s emerging and multiplying itself at a time when we are seeing increased social mobilization and conflictuality. Issues such as globalizing capitalism, trade agreements, failed development, neoliberalism, and the war on terrorism are met by opposed dynamics whether they be Chiapas and the multiplication of indigenous movements, global resistance counter-summits and social forums or the independent organizing of the unemployed in numerous countries. Different struggles in distant places are articulating themselves through a similar discourse and already the term ‘movement of movements’ is one in common usage amongst activists. While in no way trying to say that this is a repeat of the sixties dynamic, it is interesting to see how similar discussions in geography begin to re-emerge with the increase of social conflictuality.

./english/302.txt:19:Precarias a la Deriva has been, until now, a research project on precariousness which aspired to take ourselves, our own precarious realities, as a point of departure, and to interpolate others in search of new forms of resistance and new spaces of encounter and cooperation built out of multiplicity. In our wanderings we have arrived at three certainties. We have determined that particular precarious positions - understood in the classic sense such as instability of employment ­ are inscribed in a general tendency towards the Œprecarization¹ of life as a whole. This tendency which threads through all social strata as a threat (³If you don¹t hew to the norm you¹ll fall into permanent instability²) and effects all spheres of life (employment, unpaid activities, urban spaces, domestic environmentsŠ) as a force of uncertainty and social atomization. We have also realized that, though the processes of precarization effect all of us, they do not effect us in the same way: society is stratified along lines of class, sex, sexual orientation or identity, age, national origin, ethnicity, level of educationŠ which place us in positions which are asymmetrical and sometimes in conflict. Any project which aspires to produce something shared must deal with these forms of stratification: genuine Œborders¹ which impede social bonds and sow fear of the Œother¹. Lastly, we have intuited that the territory in which precarious women might come together is not necessarily the ³workplace²: how could it be when this so frequently coincides with one¹s own house, or someone else¹s? When the workplace changes every few months or when the odds of coinciding with a group of fellow workers for long enough to get to know them is one in a thousand? Often the strongest alliances, the networks of cooperation which diminish fear, lend courage and generate the capacity for transformation are constructed outside the workplace, in other spaces far from the boss¹s gaze, the isolation of the household or the bureaucratic discipline of the residency, the hospital, the school. For this reason our efforts are now dedicated to creating a space of encounter and empowerment in the center of Madrid in which we and other precarious women (of other national and social origins, with more or less lines in their CVs, more or less money in their pockets, more or less persons dependent upon them) might find counsel and tools for self-defense against the thousand and one daily injustices we face. But also where we might find spaces for expression and analysis of our precarious realities which permit us to mutually enrich ourselves and to imagine practices of cooperation and resistance against the precarization of our lives and against the borders which each of us face.

./english/302.txt:55:So what are we calling for? How do we begin to construct this agency? First of all we would like to invite you to think about how to get this space working in order to give free rein to the ³instinct²: its pieces, its relationship with other organizational tools and knowledge, its imagination, its relationship with other networks and alliances, its material means, its communicative capacityŠ We part from the idea that we are all Œexperts¹ in our own existence, that we have all already developed precarious resources to confront conflicts and to get by, one way or the other, in daily life: shared care-work, sporadic labor protests, health advice, information, legal juggling acts, etc. Some of you, moreover, know well the ins and outs of this or that specific field: the legal system, the health care system, social work, nursing, communication, pleasureŠ Many of you know these fields and feel dissatisfied because they are embedded within institutional logics which domesticate them and impede criticism and contamination. So this is an invitation to produce an estrangement, to think about how to do things in a different way, with different premises and, above all, for other ends. Consider yourselves invited to this first phase, which will consist of a few encounters, first to present the project and then to share ideas and to get the structure of the agency working. Many of you are very busy but we think the gamble is worth it. There is not just one rhythm of participation, together we can invent different forms of participation. The space, the Eskalera Karakola (www.sindominio.net/karakola) in its new location at Embajadores 52 will soon be ready. If you can¹t come to the center we invite you to share your proposals and your concerns through our email: precariasaladeriva@sindominio.net

./english/313.txt:101:A creative line is the collective construction of cartography maps “a caballo” of process of social mobilisation. Some examples are the maps of Bureua d’Etudes and the University Tangente about multinational networks, the bonairence Grup of street art about resistance, the map against/about the Forum of the cultures (but not against the War) of Barcelona or the map of conflicts in metropolitan territory of Rome done by Transform! Italia (publish us: “La riva sinistra del Tevere” by Carta).

./english/316.txt:66:This movement, as suggested, has many names, these reflecting sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping, approaches, theories, strategies and aspirations. These understandings vary from the traditional leftist, the non-traditional leftist, to the innovatory, and even the insistence that this is not a movement but a ‘field’. Elsewhere an attempt has been made to capture, or at least conceptualise, the phenomenon under the rubric of ‘global civil society’. The ways even sympathetic theorists/strategists try to identify groups or tendencies within the movement is revealing both of their orientation and of the novel nature of the phenomenon. (Aguiton 2001, Bertinoti 2003, Callinicos 2003, Crossley 2002, Glasius, Kaldor and Anheier 2002, Pianta 2001, Starr 2000, Santos 2003).

./english/316.txt:94:The new localisms and new internationalisms of the present day are inspired by the explicit or implicit recognition that ‘the nation-state...is at once too large and too small for the range of real social purposes’ (Williams 1983:197). What holds these levels/spaces/foci together, in a possibly conflictive but unavoidable tension, is the more-recent recognition, by the Zapatistas, of the necessity for ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (EZLN 1997). The manner in which various movement elements interact is indicated by Figure 2 below. This suggests that what matters is neither a leading vanguard nor a master coordinator but the relative strength of the links, or the intensity of flows.

./english/320.txt:13:This essay engages with the collective political agency of dominant and subaltern groups in the era of global neoliberal capitalism from three different angles. The first part of the essay outlines the basic framework of a Marxist theory of social movements, which proposes that the collective political agency of dominant and subaltern groups be conceptualized in terms of social movements from above and below. Moreover, the argument is made that the making and unmaking of historically specific social organizations of human practice are fundamentally animated by the dialectical relationship of conflictual process between the two. The second part of the essay applies this framework in a prolegomenon to an analysis of, on the one hand, the implementation, consolidation and globalization of neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s, and, on the other hand, the transition from defensive to offensive struggles against neoliberalism and the emergent crystallization of a new political subject in the form of the movement of movements. The third part discusses the role and relevance of normative ideals of rights and justice for the movement of movements, and argues for the development of an ethics of praxis through which new universalisms can be articulated. The essay concludes with some reflections on the role of activist research vis-à-vis these processes.

./english/320.txt:19:What I want to propose here is that Marxism does not have a specific theory about social movements because it is in itself a theory of social movements. To say this suggests a much broader view of social movements than that dominant in much mainstream sociology, where social movements are thought of as field-specific institutional formations– i.e. unconventional or informal political organizations and campaigns, but excluding (with a few honourable exceptions) such issues as revolutions, political parties, popular culture and consciousness, states and capital. What I propose is that the conflictual historical process of developing needs and capacities through the social organization of human practice constitutes the kernel of Marxism as a theory of social movements.

./english/320.txt:21:Rather this understanding of social movements, drawing in particular on Western Marxist theory, revolves around a view of history and the making and unmaking of social structures as the product of human practice – and, more importantly, the outcome of collective human practice, articulated in and through conflictswhich encompass the totality constituted by a given social organization of human practice, and in turn define that totality. These conflicts are not only grounded in the material activity of human beings; they also revolve around how that activity and its social organization are to develop: as Touraine (1981) puts it, these are conflicts over historicity, over the ways in which societies produce themselves. Social movements, in this perspective, are not considered as ruptures of an otherwise passive or institutionalized social/political landscape. They are the ways in which human practices are socially articulated. Thus, the following definition is appropriate:

./english/320.txt:52:In this context the difficulty for activists is often not to get locked into a purely defensive response, which often means defending institutions whose value is often very ambiguous. The crisis situation represents a moment of possibility, during which movements from below can not only attempt to hold onto what is valuable in existing institutions, but also to open up new spaces of conflict. At the core of their opponents’ strategy is a situation of uncertainty and doubt about previous approaches, and this is important to understand, whether or not it is possible for movements from below to take independent initiatives. Practical activist choices necessarily depend on seeing the different ways in which these movements from above affect different social groups. There is always a need for two faces of power: one turned towards those whose practices and ideas are effectively organised and incorporated, in whatever form, and one turned towards those whose consent is not needed or sought within a particular regime. These two faces target different groups: within capitalism, the consent of large capital and those controlling the means of state coercion is needed almost by definition. At the other end of the spectrum, the “lumpenproletariat” and the least organised parts of the working class will almost always be targeted with coercive measures to some degree. Other groups, such as trade unionists or liberal professionals, may find themselves within the sphere of consent or within that of coercion.

./english/320.txt:63:At times, local rationalities may erupt in the form of overt acts of defiance and opposition to the dominant social organizations of human practice. What I want to consider is the nature of the struggles that might emerge when localrationalities are made more unitary and coherent. I propose the concept militant particularism as a tool for grappling with the forms of struggle that may emerge if such a process of extraction and development takes place. That is, militant particularisms are what emerge when local rationalities move from existing as tacit potentialities (latent within common sense) to becoming embodied in explicit practices (and good sense), through conflictual encounters

./english/320.txt:64:with hegemonic forces. The concept 'militant particularism' was coined by Raymond Williams (1989: 249) and has later been developed by David Harvey (1996, 2000) to refer to the particularist origins of movement struggles. The concept refers to how 'politics is always embedded in 'ways of life' and 'structures of feeling' peculiar to places and communities' (Harvey, 2000: 55) and hence also bears the imprint of this specificity and situatedness, both in terms of the issues that are struggles over, and the practices, skills, idioms, and imaginaries that are deployed in the struggle. A militant particularism, then, can be defined as that those forms of struggle that emerge when a subaltern group deploys specific knowledges and skills in open confrontation with a dominant social group, in a particular place and at a particular time, in a particular conflict over a particular issue.

./english/320.txt:67:skills, idioms, and imaginaries of which they are made up can be generalized; these can then transcend the particular locale in which they have emerged and thus be applied across a spectrum of specific situations and singular struggles. This is one reason for speaking of local rationalities, as something which can firstly be derived from experience and hidden transcripts and articulated in public ways. This process of practices, skills, idioms, and imaginaries specific to a given site of conflict and struggle transcending the boundaries of this site is fundamental to the process of abstraction and translation through which activists go beyond the immediate parameters of the local of resistance in which they are situated.

./english/320.txt:105:The current conjuncture, I submit, is one of a nascent organic crisis and contention between emergent world historical movements from above and below. From above, there is the project of neoliberal restructuring. From below a ‘movement of movements’ for global social justice is in the process of crystallizing. In what follows, I offer a brief and broad-brushed sketch of this scenario. The Crisis of Organized Capitalism and the Emergence of Neoliberal Restructuring The late 1960s and early 1970s marked the onset of a profound crisis in the social structure of accumulation commonly referred to as ‘organized capitalism’ (see, e.g., Lash and Urry 1987). The golden age of capitalism that had lasted since the end of WWII crumbled: By the end of the 1960s [organized capitalism] experienced cracks in its foundations and began to fall apart under conditions of stagnant production, declining productivity, and intensified class conflict over higher wages, greater social benefits and better working conditions. These conditions created a profit-crunch on invested capital’ (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001: 14; see also Armstrong, Glyn and Harrison 1984 and Harvey 1990). Simultaneously, the advanced capitalist state and the social compact that underpinned it faced a loss of legitimacy. From below, this was evident in the global uprisings of 1968 (Katsiaficas 1987; Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 1989; Wainwright 1994).

./english/325.txt:75:In November 1999, after the big struggles in Seattle, a social movement came into the limelight that in the media was quickly labelled as the anti-globalisation movement and was described as something totally new. But it is a myth to think this movement suddenly descended from the sky in Seattle, just as it is a myth that the activists had suddenly discovered a new theme, that the movement only consists of people from the rich Western countries and that the activists are against globalisation (Van Stokrom 2002: 37). Before Seattle all kinds of action groups, started in the ‘developing’ world of the South (Kingsnorth 2003: 172-173; 312) and connected with movements in the North, were fighting against the global powers of the World Bank (Berlin 1988, Madrid 1994), the IMF, the European Union (1989-1992, 1997) etc. Older activists, particularly those mobilized around “Jubilee 2000” or affiliated with peace movement organizations like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, traced their opposition back to the 1980s mobilizations around third-world debt and its relations to conflict and economic justice in Central America and other developing regions (Smith, 2001: 4).

./english/331.txt:53:Economists don't often deal with morals, and academic criticism of the neo-liberal viewpoint tends more towards the slippage between theory and economic reality (eg. Rodrik, 2002). Here, Sally states explicitly, that which is usually left implicit: freedom in and of itself is a universal moral value. I hesitate to criticise an eminent scholar such as Sally. But how can this argument stand when access to choices can never be equal? Liberty in itself may be a fundamental human right, but if I exercise my freedom to choose and it conflicts with your human rights, then I must be constrained by recourse to a truly universal value: justice.

./english/331.txt:66:"FoE demands the 'right' to a clean environment. Fine, except that it conflicts with the 'right' to a comfortable standard of living."

./english/331.txt:151:This is a tall order for the average fifteen-year-old. However, moral development does not occur in a vacuum – social learning theorists point to the importance of role models and transactional exchanges, and as Berkowitz (1982; cited in Nucci, 1987) has illustrated, progression is dependent on the opportunity to experience conflict. Given the right circumstances, it may be possible to fulfil Crick’s expectations.

./english/331.txt:174:b)Development of abstract reasoning skills and increasing critical evaluation of personally constructed rules through introduction of moral reasoning dilemmas as a teaching strategy. These will be based on interpersonal situations at first, still emphasising the use of empathy. Opportunities to create conflict and discussion in the classroom through increasing use of a balanced, stated commitment, or neutral chair approach should be used whenever possible.

./english/331.txt:256:4.The use of peer transactions and specifically conflicting discussion in the classroom.

./english/334.txt:99:inducing armed conflict with North Korea, but the whole initiative in

./english/343.txt:22:People who fall victim to these policies and the conflicts linked to them are often forced to flee their country. In the era of free movement of capital a fundamental task of the social movements we belong to is defending migrants' rights, the rights of those fleeing neoliberalism and oppression, and the rights of women fleeing from forced marriages or sexual mutilation.

./english/347.txt:42:Here one could see, the real existing balance of forces in the EPAs and ESFs on show. The whole question of transparency is used to avoid political conflict and bore people to death with vacuous debates on “method”. So an open “preparatory meeting” for the next Preparatory Assembly will take place in January. It will decide the exact date and venue of the EPA. This will meet again at the end of March 2007 to decide on the location of the next European Social Forum. The three candidates for holding its are Austria, Denmark-Sweden and Portugal.

./english/348.txt:14:Also once again we want to support the self-determination right of the peoples like a first step for resolutions of conflicts and development of the societies. Also we support the sovereignty of the peoples, having or not having national states and all the open democratic processes as in Basque Country and in Ireland.

./english/362.txt:105:I shall summarise the principles that could possibly govern another kind of global system. The first is the logic of the transition to socialism. This will combine the criterion of capitalism, that is, efficiency as measured by profitability; and, the criterion of social justice. Although the term social justice is very elastic, certain elements can be defined in concrete terms. I am sure any Indian citizen from the popular classes can tell you what he/she means by social justice. It would necessarily mean jobs, reasonable and decent wages, schools for his/her children and decent health care. That is social justice, not socialism. These are not going to be produced by the market, but these will be imposed on the market by a social policy of the state. This kind of system associates capitalistic criteria with social criteria, which will be in conflict. But the system recognises that they are conflicting and therefore must be managed without allowing the market to dominate society unilaterally. It also recognises the fact that the free play of markets creates problems for society. Therefore, society will solve the problem through the exercise of political power. If such a system obtains in several countries, then we can create the conditions for regional arrangements among them, and of changes in the global system.

./english/363.txt:17:History, Hunter Thompson said, is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit (1972: 65). And of course there is no way that one person can reasonably hope to grasp all these different things except at third hand. We grasp the world we're in at first hand, through the politics of our own everyday situations and conflicts, and at second hand, through other people's actions and words. But what they (and we) reflect is the echo of six thousand million people, all working with their own situations and trying to make sense of them in the process. So this paper comes with no guarantees!

./english/363.txt:77:Translating these into counter-hegemonic politics, conflictual cultural strategies and popular self-definitions, it was clear firstly that such a situation is considerably from the existing shape of Irish movements, secondly that change in that direction would require a remarkable (but not impossible) process of creation, and thirdly that in disorganised capitalism there is scope for this kind of thing. Two years back this seemed a very long-term strategy; today it seems entirely within reach. I don't want to push this particular analysis (though I've brought copies along!), so much as to say that we can and should engage in this kind of thinking: "what would we need to do if ? we were serious about the goals we proclaim and the processes we value?"

./english/363.txt:105:Whatever its weaknesses, this cultural definition was deeply necessary in shaking popular creativity free from an official Left which had bought deeply into popular culture as shaped from above during the period of organised capitalism, with its attendant patriarchy, racism and nationalism. Fragmentation, like the anti-authoritarian revolt itself, was a necessary step if anyone was ever to learn anything new. The "Seattle moment" starts from the slow interaction between this way of doing things (refracted through the cultures of non-violent direct action) and the kind of large-scale popular movements whose absence underlay the initial cultural dérive of the Anglo Sixties. In this sense the tendency to fragmentation has been a strength, in its centrifugal distribution of conflicts throughout a once relatively stable cultural setup and consequent enabling of multiple routes into activism - though it poses significant problems once "convergence" becomes possible again.

./english/365.txt:56:In the American case, the model for activist issue campaigns can be traced to “corporate” campaigns pioneered by labor unions in the early 1980s (Manheim 2001). These corporate campaigns have now spread throughout activist and advocacy circles, being adopted by environmental, health, human rights, as well as by anti-globalization and sustainable development groups and coalitions. For example, a small global network of NGOs stopped Monsanto’s plans to develop genetically engineered seed with a successful media campaign labeling the sterile seed strain “The Terminator.” And the small human rights organization Global Witness successfully targeted the diamond giant De Beers, which ultimately agreed to limit the market for the bloody “conflict” diamonds that motivated mercenary armies to establish regimes of terror in crumbling African states (Cowell 2001).

./english/365.txt:67:Such networks that do not produce common ideological or issue frames allow different political perspectives to co-exist without the conflicts that such differences might create in more centralized coalitions. On most days, conservative United States Senator Orrin Hatch and consumer activist Ralph Nader would not find themselves in the same political universe. Yet they have comfortably occupied network space for years in the anti-Microsoft network. The network of opposition to Microsoft includes businesses (Sun, Oracle, Netscape and others), consumer protection organizations, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Government Accountability Project, labor organizers, and thousands of direct “hactivists” (Manheim, 2001; Bennett, 2003c). These

./english/365.txt:69:Ideologically weak networks can reduce the conflicts often associated with diverse players entering campaigns, they also may harbor intellectual contradictions. Thus, when the moment arrived to adopt solutions for the Microsoft “problem,” there was considerable disagreement among key players about what a proper settlement of the antitrust charges might look like. And when the legal ordeal began to take a toll on Miscosoft stock value (which fell in the wake of an initial judicial ruling calling for extreme penalties), the union campaign on labor issues was undermined by company cutbacks.

./english/365.txt:108:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 32 Mass media framing of movements clearly varies from case to case, depending on how activist communication strategies interact with media gatekeeping (Gamson, 2001). Gitlin (1980) identified the demand of news organizations for movements to produce leaders and simple messages as part of the explanation why the American new left of the 1960s received considerable media attention, and also fragmented into disunity and internal conflict. A global activist movement that is committed to inclusiveness and diversity over central leadership and issue simplicity should have low expectations of news coverage of demonstrations that display the movement’s leaderless diversity in chaotic settings.

./english/367.txt:44:New movements called forth new organizations, or breathed life into old ones. And there were inevitable conflicts, some common the world over, some specific to the Indian situation, between old mass organizations and parties, on the one hand, and the new organizations. This was to result in the formation of a new type of radical milieu. The movements stressed autonomy, identity, and participatory democracy. By autonomy they meant that the movement must be independent of state control as well as control by any other external force — including political parties. The stress on identity was a response to all overarching claims that sought to subsume distinct struggles under a hegemonic banner. This included nationalism as well as the claim that the resolution of the class struggle would solve all other issues in passing.

./english/367.txt:145:The participatory budget in Rio Grande do Sul was undoubtedly an important learning experience for the workers and others who participated in the process. It undoubtedly contributed to the participants’ understanding of economic and political questions and their desire for more control over the decisions that affect their lives. And this concept was not developed by those who would ultimately surrender meekly to the IMF. However, as long as the state apparatus remains in the hands of the capitalists, the extension of democracy to direct democracy would not be as massive a change as Novak seems to have imagined. There would be a necessary conflict between the aspirations of the toiling people assembled in the participatory budget’s discussion processes, and the demands of the IMF, of imperialism, of Brazilian big capital and the central banking system.

./english/368.txt:11:In the narrow terms of traditional military conflict, the Zapatista uprising has been confined to a limited zone in Chiapas. However, through their ability to extend their political reach via modern computer networks the Zapatistas have woven a new electronic fabric of struggle to carry their revolution throughout Mexico and around the world.

./english/368.txt:26:On the other side of the symbiosis, the cyberspace world of computer communication networks was itself already the terrain of manifold struggles and thus open to appropriation by those whose own forms of organization were pre-disposed to building strength through linkages with others. While this is not the place to delve too deeply into the antagonisms and class conflicts of the computer industry, it is important to recognize and remember that, like all other capitalist industries, it has developed as an integral part of the changing international division of labor power. Its workers --from semiconductor engineers through hardware assemblers to programmers-- can be found in both North and South. Within this context there has been a complex set of ongoing struggles between those who do the work and those who make the profits.

./english/368.txt:40:The first working computer network was ARPANET (on-line in 1969), financed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Defense Department. ARPANET grew out of a line of Cold War research on making Western military communications possible in the event of nuclear war, i.e., in the event that much of the communications system itself would be destroyed by Soviet nuclear weapons. The design that was developed within this context of military conflict was a highly flexible, geographically dispersed web of multiple linkages. The organization of that web allowed specially formatted information to move from any point to any other point through many, many possible routes. Thus, even if many of those possible routes were destroyed, many others would still be functioning and the information would get through.(10) In the absence of war, ARPANET was developed to facilitate the long distance sharing of computer time by researchers working on military and other government projects. The supersession of ARPANET by a network of interlinked networks (The Matrix or The Net) has involved the multiplication of linkages and increased both the flexibility and certainty of communication for anyone and everyone using it --military AND the ever more numerous civilian users. When the Mexican state sought to block the flow of information about the uprising in Chiapas it was outflanked every bit as effectively as any Soviet strike might have been. It could keep Televisa from reporting the facts, but it couldn't prevent thousands of independent computer operators from passing them on to all who wanted to know.

./english/368.txt:52:Alternatively, participants in social conflicts in society have extended their struggles from other zones of human space into cyberspace. Groups of individuals who have already organized discussion and action outside of cyberspace --such as the indigenous and campesino groups in Chiapas and their supporters-- can reach others through it. Reaching others may involve drawing individuals into their organizing efforts and it may involve creating new connections with other groups for collaborative efforts. Those groups whose members generally have individual access to The Net can use it to enhance their own internal communications. Such "networking", as we have seen, predates cyberspace, but The Net (like mail, telephone and fax before it) has dramatically extended and speeded up the process.

./english/368.txt:72:As journalistic, humanitarian, religious and indigenous observers have visited the conflict zone in Chiapas and written up what they have found, their reports --often embarrassing to the Mexican government and its supporters because confirming Zapatista statements-- have been circulated through the same computer networks providing vital material for the growing network of solidarity organizations. When grassroots groups came together at the behest of the Zapatistas in early August 1994 at the new Aguacalientes carved out of the jungle to form the Convencion Nacional Democratica, and then again later at San Cristobal, Chiapas (October 11-13, 1994), Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas (November 4-6, 1994) and Queretaro (February 1-5, 1995) speeches, reports and convention documents were circulated on The Net. Much of this material certainly deserves being labeled with the term used by Italian militants: "contro-informazione" (counter-information) opposed to the official reports of governments and commercial mass media.

./english/368.txt:102:One of the more provocative of these analyses to come to light, so far, has been that by national security analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt working at RAND Corp.(42) In a 1993 report entitled "CyberWar is Coming!", they formulate two related concepts: cyberwar and netwar --in both of which the role of information is central and critical. The former refers to military war making while the latter refers to "societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication", "most often associated with low intensity conflict". Their examples of cyberwar range from the Mongols to the Gulf War. One of their primary examples of netwar is how "advocacy movements" are "increasingly organizing into cross-border networks and coalitions, identifying more with the development of civil society (even global civil society) than with nation-states and using advanced information and communications technologies to strengthen their activities". While Arquilla and Ronfeldt cite movements concerned with environmental, human-rights and religious issues, the pro-Zapatista movement is clearly another example of the kind of activity they are concerned with. In their discussion the "other side" of such "netwar" is the state and its traditional hierarchical institutions of governance. With their writing directed primarily at the U.S. government --with which they clearly identify-- they warn that new forms of warfare must be developed appropriate to this new arena of power.(43)

./english/368.txt:124:In the case of the Zapatistas and Mexico, it is clear that the Mexican state is well aware of the way The Net is being used to undermine its credibility and challenge its policies. This became publicly evident when Jose Angel Guru, Mexican Secretary of State, told an April 1995 gathering of businessmen at the World Trade Center that the conflict in Chiapas was a "war of ink, of the written word and a war of the Internet".(56) How the Mexican government has chosen to fight this "war of the Internet" has become a hotly debated subject on The Net itself.

./english/368.txt:156:What all of this means is that as the struggles on The Net have moved from mobilization against military repression to the circulation of Zapatista ideas and the discussion of their political visions and programs, the conflicts in this electronic fabric of connections will increasingly take on all the complexity of the more general political, economic and social crises in Mexico.

./english/369.txt:45:The EU has chosen to line up behind the policy of the Bush government. It aspires to join in US hegemony on a world scale, while putting itself forward as a rival. The EU accepts the US's general orientation ("the global fight against international terrorism"), its organisation (full commitment to and consistent reform of NATO) and its means (increasing military budgets and militarisation). But at the moment the EU does not share the rhetoric, the will to take the offensive or the announced key objectives of US policy (war against Iraq—or Iran). This reflects both divisions within the EU and the private interests of the big European financial-industrial conglomerates, at a time when trans-Atlantic conflicts are multiplying and intensifying on the economic level. The mythology of a "peaceful "and "generous" EU is breaking down. What the ruling classes want is a European great power.

./english/369.txt:83:The EU's structure was despotic from the very beginning. The bulk of the executive, legislative and constituent power is now more than ever in the hands of the EU governments (especially those of the biggest countries), meeting in the European Councils of Ministers, the European Council of heads of state and government and the Intergovernmental Conference. The EU thus does not even reach the level of bourgeois parliamentary democracy that is left in its member states. This is how neo-liberal Europe escapes from the pressure of the working classes, who are being put in competition with each other, country by country, through unequal working conditions and social legislation. This is how it is trying to settle the multiple material conflicts of interest amongst its ruling classes, behind and on the people's backs.

./english/374.txt:18:It is not the purpose of these notes to detail the different conflicts of a local character that have been occurring since the surrender of Japan, neither do we intend to recount the numerous and increasing instances of civilian strife which have taken place during these years of apparent peace. It will be enough just to name, as an example against undue optimism, the wars of Korea and Vietnam.

./english/374.txt:30:But, evidently, the focal point of all contradictions is at present the territory of the peninsula of Indo-China and the adjacent areas. Laos and Vietnam are torn by a civil war which has ceased being such by the entry into the conflict of U.S. imperialism with all its might, thus transforming the whole zone into a dangerous detonator ready at any moment to explode.

./english/374.txt:92:In Rhodesia we have a different problem: British imperialism used every means within its reach to place power in the hands of the white minority, who, at the present time, unlawfully holds it. The conflict, from the British point of view, is absolutely unofficial; this Western power, with its habitual diplomatic cleverness -- also called hypocrisy in the strict sense of the word -- presents a facade of displeasure before the measures adopted by the government of Ian Smith. Its crafty attitude is supported by some Commonwealth countries that follow it, but is attacked by a large group of countries belonging to Black Africa, whether they are or not servile economic lackeys of British imperialism.

./english/375.txt:69:The last thing I wan to talk about is Venezuela. We’ve had an epic conflict taking place there over the last five weeks. It is conflict between the rich and the poor. The rich are backed by the United States. The poor come on the streets in support of Chavez. But it has to be said the demonstrations behind the rich and the demonstrations behind the poor have been more or less equal in size – although people argue that the recent pro0-Chavez demonstrations have been slightly larger.

./english/379.txt:32:Consequently, in this paper, I focus on the ways that an oppositional politics can use new technologies to intervene within the global restructuring of capitalism to promote democratic and anti-capitalist social movements aiming at radical structural transformation. I would argue that globalization and technological revolution are in some ways inevitable -- barring an apocalyptic collapse of the global economy -- but the forms that they take are not. That is, I think that the trends toward a more global economy and culture, a networked society, and the continued flow of commodities, images, cultural forms, technology and people across the globe will continue apace, as will intense technological revolution. Both take the form of what Schumpeter called åcreative destructionπ and guarantee that the next decades will be highly turbulent, contested and full of struggle and conflict. But the forms that globalization and technological revolution will take are neither fixed nor determined. Hence, I would argue that it is perfectly reasonable to oppose corporate capitalist globalization and its market model of society, its neoliberal laissez-faire ideology and its putting profit, competition and market logic before all other aspects of life. I will accordingly focus on the ways that technopolitics can and are being used for anti-capitalist contestation, while noting the limitations of this conception.

./english/379.txt:152:The internet is thus a contested terrain, used by the left, right and centre to advance their own agendas and interests. The political battles of the future may well be fought in the streets, factories, parliaments and other sites of past conflicts, but all political struggle is now mediated by media, computer and information technologies and increasingly will be so. Those interested in the politics and culture of the future should therefore be clear on the important role of the new public spheres and act accordingly.

./english/379.txt:182:[6] There was, however, an assassination of Zapatista supporters by local death squads in early 1998 -- which once again triggered significant internet-generated pressures on the Mexican government to prosecute the perpetrators. Likewise, there has been ongoing government repression and sporadic violence, although, so far, the kind of massive repression of the movement favoured by many in the Mexican military and political establishment has been avoided. I should also mention here the incredibly conflicting interpretations of the Zapatista movement by its supporters and detractors, and the problem that it has been given iconic significance with all the attendant mythologization in the contemporary era. For my purposes, it represents a strong example of how new technologies can be used as an arm of political struggle and how computer-mediated technologies can help generate global support networks and circulate information of revolutionary struggles and movements.

./english/380.txt:17: Indeed, globalization is one of the most hotly debated issues of the present era. For some, it is a cover concept for global capitalism and imperialism, and is accordingly condemned as another form of the imposition of the logic of capital and the market on ever more regions of the world and spheres of life. For others, it is the continuation of modernization and a force of progress, increased wealth, freedom, democracy, and happiness. Its defenders present globalization as beneficial, generating fresh economic opportunities, political democratization, cultural diversity, and the opening to an exciting new world. Its critics see globalization as harmful, bringing about increased domination and control by the wealthier overdeveloped nations over the poor underdeveloped countries, thus increasing the hegemony of the “haves” over the “have nots.” In addition, supplementing the negative view, globalization critics assert that globalization produces an undermining of democracy, a cultural homogenization, and increased destruction of natural species and the environment.[2] Some imagine the globalization project -- whether viewed positively or negatively -- as inevitable and beyond human control and intervention, whereas others view globalization as generating new conflicts and new spaces for struggle, distinguishing between globalization from above and globalization from below (and Brecher, Costello, and Smith 2000).

./english/380.txt:65: From these economistic perspectives, globalization is merely a continuation of previous social tendencies; i.e. the logic of capital and domination by corporate and commercial interests of the world economy and culture. Defenders of capitalism, by contrast, present globalization as the triumph of free markets, democracy, and individual freedom (Fukuyama 1998 and Friedman 1999). Hence, there are both positive and negative versions of economic and technological determinism. Most theories of globalization, therefore, are reductive, undialectical, and one-sided, either failing to see the interaction between technological features of globalization and the global restructuring of capitalism, or the complex relations between capitalism and democracy. Dominant discourses of globalization are thus one-sidedly for or against globalization, failing to articulate the contradictions and the conflicting costs and benefits, upsides and downsides, of the process. Hence, many current theories of globalization do not capture the novelty and ambiguity of the present moment that involves both innovative forms of technology and economy -- and emergent conflicts and problems generated by the contradictions of globalization.

./english/380.txt:77: Moreover, with the turn toward neo-liberalism as a hegemonic ideology and practice, the market and its logic comes to triumph over public goods and the state is subservient to economic imperatives and logic. Yet the term technocapitalism points to a new configuration of capitalist society in which technical and scientific knowledge, computerization and automation of labor, and information technology and multimedia play a role in the process of production analogous to the function of human labor power, mechanization of the labor process, and machines in an earlier era of capitalism. This process is generating novel modes of societal organization, forms of culture and everyday life, conflicts, and modes of struggle.

./english/380.txt:97: The terrorist acts on the United States on September 11 and subsequent Terror War dramatically disclose the downsides of globalization, the ways that global flows of technology, goods, information, ideologies, and people can have destructive as well as productive effects. The disclosure of powerful anti-Western terrorist networks shows that globalization divides the world as it unifies, that it produces enemies as it incorporates participants. The events disclose explosive contradictions and conflicts at the heart of globalization and that the technologies of information, communication, and transportation that facilitate globalization can also be used to undermine and attack it, and generate instruments of destruction as well as production[k1] .[4]

./english/380.txt:101: The experience of September 11 points to the objective ambiguity of globalization, that positive and negative sides are interconnected, that the institutions of the open society unlock the possibilities of destruction and violence, as well as democracy, free trade, and cultural and social exchange. Once again, the interconnection and interdependency of the networked world was dramatically demonstrated as terrorists from the Middle East brought local grievances from their region to attack key symbols of American power and the very infrastructure of New York. Some saw terrorism as an expression of “the dark side of globalization,” while I would conceive it as part of the objective ambiguity of globalization that simultaneously creates friends and enemies, wealth and poverty, and growing divisions between the “haves” and “have nots.” Yet, the downturning of the global economy, intensification of local and global political conflicts, repression of human rights and civil liberties, and general increase in fear and anxiety have certainly undermined the naïve optimism of globaphiles who perceived globalization as a purely positive instrument of progress and well-being.

./english/380.txt:105: The use of powerful technologies as weapons of destruction also discloses current asymmetries of power and emergent forms of terrorism and war, as the new millennium exploded into dangerous conflicts and interventions. As technologies of mass destruction become more available and dispersed, perilous instabilities have emerged that have elicited policing measures to stem the flow of movements of people and goods across borders and internally. In particular, the USA Patriot Act has led to repressive measures that are replacing the spaces of the open and free information society with new forms of surveillance, policing, and repression (see Kellner, forthcoming).

./english/380.txt:113: In any case, the events of September 11 have promoted a fury of reflection, theoretical debates, and political conflicts and upheaval that put the complex dynamics of globalization at the center of contemporary theory and politics. To those skeptical of the centrality of globalization to contemporary experience, it is now clear that we are living in a global world that is highly interconnected and vulnerable to passions and crises that can cross borders and can effect anyone or any region at any time. The events of September 11 also provide a test case to evaluate various theories of globalization and the contemporary era. In addition, they highlight some of the contradictions of globalization and the need to develop a highly complex and dialectical model to capture its conflicts, ambiguities, and contradictory effects.

./english/380.txt:121: The processes of globalization are highly turbulent and have generated new conflicts throughout the world. Benjamin Barber (1998) describes the strife between McWorld and Jihad, contrasting the homogenizing, commercialized, Americanized tendencies of the global economy and culture with traditional cultures which are often resistant to globalization. Thomas Friedman (1999) makes a more benign distinction between what he calls the "Lexus" and the "Olive Tree." The former is a symbol of modernization, of affluence and luxury, and of Westernized consumption, contrasted with the Olive Tree that is a symbol of roots, tradition, place, and stable community. Barber (1997), however, is too negative toward McWorld and Jihad, failing to adequately describe the democratic and progressive forces within both. Although Barber recognizes a dialectic of McWorld and Jihad, he opposes both to democracy, failing to perceive how both generate their own democratic forces and tendencies, as well as opposing and undermining democratization. Within the Western democracies, for instance, there is not just top-down homogenization and corporate domination, but also globalization-from-below and oppositional social movements that desire alternatives to capitalist globalization. Thus, it is not only traditionalist, non-Western forces of Jihad that oppose McWorld. Likewise, Jihad has its democratizing forces as well as the reactionary Islamic fundamentalists who are now the most demonized elements of the contemporary era, as I discuss below. Jihad, like McWorld, has its contradictions and its potential for democratization, as well as elements of domination and destruction (see Kellner, forthcoming).

./english/380.txt:133: My intention is to present globalization as conflictual, contradictory and open to resistance and democratic intervention and transformation and not just as a monolithic juggernaut of progress or domination as in many discourses. This goal is advanced by distinguishing between "globalization from below" and the "globalization from above" of corporate capitalism and the capitalist state, a distinction that should help us to get a better sense of how globalization does or does not promote democratization. "Globalization from below" refers to the ways in which marginalized individuals and social movements resist globalization and/or use its institutions and instruments to further democratization and social justice. While on one level, globalization significantly increases the supremacy of big corporations and big government, it can also give power to groups and individuals that were previously left out of the democratic dialogue and terrain of political struggle. Such potentially positive effects of globalization include increased access to education for individuals excluded from entry to culture and knowledge and the possibility of oppositional individuals and groups to participate in global culture and politics through gaining access to global communication and media networks and to circulate local struggles and oppositional ideas through these media. The role of new technologies in social movements, political struggle, and everyday life forces social movements to reconsider their political strategies and goals and democratic theory to appraise how new technologies do and do not promote democratization (Kellner 1997 and 1999b).

./english/380.txt:145: The present conjuncture, I would suggest, is marked by a conflict between growing centralization and organization of power and wealth in the hands of the few contrasted with opposing processes exhibiting a fragmentation of power that is more plural, multiple, and open to contestation than was previously the case. As the following analysis will suggest, both tendencies are observable and it is up to individuals and groups to find openings for political intervention and social transformation. Thus, rather than just denouncing globalization, or engaging in celebration and legitimation, a critical theory of globalization reproaches those aspects that are oppressive, while seizing upon opportunities to fight domination and exploitation and to promote democratization, justice, and a progressive reconstruction of the polity, society, and culture.

./english/380.txt:240: In a certain sense, the phenomena of globalization replicates the history of the U.S. and most so-called capitalist democracies in which tension between capitalism and democracy has been the defining feature of the conflicts of the past two hundred years. In analyzing the development of education in the United States Bowles and Gintis (1986) and Aronowitz and Giroux (1986) have analyzed the conflicts between corporate logic and democracy in schooling; Robert McChesney (1996 and 1999), myself (Kellner 1990, 1992, 2001, and forthcoming), and others have articulated the contradictions between capitalism and democracy in the media and public sphere; while Joel Cohen and Joel Rogers (1983) and many others are arguing that contradictions between capitalism and democracy are defining features of the U.S. polity and history.

./english/380.txt:244: On a global terrain, Hardt and Negri (2000) have stressed the openings and possibilities for democratic transformative struggle within globalization, or what they call Empire. I am arguing that similar arguments can be made in which globalization is not conceived merely as the triumph of capitalism and democracy working together as it was in the classical theories of Milton Friedman or more recently in Francis Fukuyama. Nor should globalization be depicted solely as the triumph of capital as in many despairing anti-globalization theories. Rather, one should see that globalization unleashes conflicts between capitalism and democracy and in its restructuring processes creates new openings for struggle, resistance, and democratic transformation.

./english/380.txt:248: I would also suggest that the model of Marx and Engels as deployed in the "Communist Manifesto" could also be usefully employed to analyze the contradictions of globalization (Marx and Engels 1978: 469ff). From the historical materialist optic, capitalism was interpreted as the greatest, most progressive force in history for Marx and Engels, destroying a backward feudalism, authoritarian patriarchy, backwardness and provincialism in favor a market society, global cosmopolitanism, and constant revolutionizing of the forces of production. Yet in the Marxian theory, so too was capitalism presented as a major disaster for the human race, condemning a large part to alienated labor, regions of the world to colonialist exploitation, and generating conflicts between classes and nations, the consequences of which the contemporary era continues to suffer.

./english/380.txt:264: As I have argued in this study, the term "globalization" is often used as a code word that stands for a tremendous diversity of issues and problems and that serves as a front for a variety of theoretical and political positions. While it can function as a legitimating ideology to cover over and sanitize ugly realities, a critical globalization theory can inflect the discourse to point precisely to these deplorable phenomena and can elucidate a series of contemporary problems and conflicts. In view of the different concepts and functions of globalization discourse, it is important to note that the concept of globalization is a theoretical construct that varies according to the assumptions and commitments of the theory in question. Seeing the term globalization as a construct helps rob it of its force of nature, as a sign of an inexorable triumph of market forces and the hegemony of capital, or, as the extreme right fears, of a rapidly encroaching world government. While the term can both describe and legitimate capitalist transnationalism and supranational government institutions, a critical theory of globalization does not buy into ideological valorizations and affirms difference, resistance, and democratic self-determination against forms of global domination and subordination.

./english/380.txt:284: Hence, a critical theory of globalization presents globalization as a force of capitalism and democracy, as a set of forces imposed from above in conjunction with resistance from below. In this optic, globalization generates new conflicts, new struggles, and new crises, which in part can be seen as resistance to capitalist logic. In the light of the neo-liberal projects to dismantle the Welfare State, colonize the public sphere, and control globalization, it is up to citizens and activists to create new public spheres, politics, and pedagogies, and to use the new technologies to discuss what kinds of society people today want and to oppose the society against which people resist and struggle. This involves, minimally, demands for more education, health care, welfare, and benefits from the state, and to struggle to create a more democratic and egalitarian society. But one cannot expect that generous corporations and a beneficent state are going to make available to citizens the bounties and benefits of the globalized new information economy. Rather, it is up to individuals and groups to promote democratization and progressive social change.

./english/383.txt:51:Negotiations in a North-South Conflictual Approach'. In: The North, the South

./english/383.txt:55:warming, the ozone layer and biodiversity as a model to highlight the North-South conflict,

./english/383.txt:137:erode the 'social and natural substratum' and here there emerge a range of conflicts. Resistance

./english/385.txt:43:Unfortunately the heritage of distrust was intensified by some of the AFL-CIO leadership of labor on the November 30 march. They chose to take a different route through downtown rather than marching with others to the Convention Center and helping to block the WTO. Also, on the march to downtown they reportedly had a conflict with the Third World People's Assembly contingent when they rudely told the people of color to move aside so they could be in the lead.

./english/386.txt:109:Violent civil upsurges have also shown a remarkable tendency to occur, often at slight provocations or flimsy excuses. In certain areas, including the metropolis Mumbai, such mass violence threatens to become endemic. More serious conflicts between different groups also break out periodically. These can be ethno-linguistic, inter-religious communities, inter-caste etc. The most serious challenge to the polity and to the democratic traditions is today posed by a mix of religion and politics (which in India also has a specific name viz. communalism). The form is of a conflict between the two large communities of the country - the majority Hindu and the minority Muslim. Communalism has now become a principle of ideology, organisation, mobilisation and of violent action.

./english/388.txt:33:There is a sixth conflict which is not fully articulated in the book, although it is present in the foreword by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (authors of Empire). It is the conflict between political parties and social movements. Parties tend to appropriate the aspiration of social movements. But at the same time they have been crucial for implementing many of the best ideas that political activists have brought forward.

./english/390.txt:61:If we look at this conflict as a straightforward eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation between "Empire" and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing.

./english/392.txt:95:become a context where conflict, competition, division, and fragmentation take place −

./english/396.txt:606:(From Denmark): Dear FIRE: You are welcome to broadcast 1-2 of my interviews (personal testimonies) in Spanish with Mayan Indians about violence and torture during 36 years of armed conflict in Guatemala. The interviews last from 15-30 minutes. You can listen to a short version on my website: www.para-nunca-olvidar.org. Yours, Lotte Holmen, Danish Radio journalist.

./english/397.txt:6:For all its failings, the international system of the UN is based on principles of partnership. It has also recognized the parallel growth of ivil society?alongside the market and the state. An international form of ivil society?has begun to emerge. One of its tasks is to monitor international commitments made by national governments ?see chart below ? where serious problems are now evident. These are political issues, often in direct conflict with the self-interest of the market or the state. Whether effective international agreements are reached and implemented depends on the political influence of social movements t home? This is no less true of the official labour movement and its international bureaucracy which need to get closer to wider social movements.

./english/400.txt:2:Social netwar and industrial conflict in a global economy

./english/400.txt:7:This paper uses the concept of social netwar to examine some current developments in industrial conflict. The paper briefly introduces the concept of information warfare and provides a context for the discussion of industrial conflict and social netwar by highlighting some recent changes in industrial relations, particularly at a transnational level. This discussion is organised around three themes, echoing Arquilla and Ronfeldt's (1998a, 1998b) framework and applying concepts of social netwar to organisational and tactical aspects of industrial conflict and to the terrain (physical and virtual) in which these conflicts are played out. The discussion frames the presentation of four examples of industrial campaigns conducted by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM) and some of its affiliated trade unions. While the unifying theme of these examples is the use of the Internet to support the campaigns, the presentation extends to include organisational and the non-virtual tactics used. A concluding discussion reflects both on the value of the concepts of information warfare and social netwar in consideration of industrial conflict and on how such concepts can inform trade union organisation.

./english/400.txt:9:The concept of information warfare, along with related ideas such as information operations, netwar and cyberwar, has gained prominence in US strategic and military circles since the early 1990s. The term 'Information warfare' is used in two broad ways. Defined in technological terms, information warfare particularly emphasises vulnerabilities in digital infrastructures to disruption by physical or digital attack (e.g. Boulanger, 1998; Cobb, 1999) and the growing 'information intensity' of battlefield operation (e.g. Libicki, 1998). The term is also used more broadly to analyse emerging types of conflict in an information society through, for example, the use of information in the management of public and adversary perceptions, and the role of information in the organisational aspects of conflict particularly in the nature and organisation of threats from sub- and non-state actors (Rathmell, 1998; Arquila & Ronfeldt, 1998a, 1998b). Many of the concepts associated with information warfare are also now being used in the analysis of conflict in economic, social and personal, as well as military, spheres (Kovacich, 1997; Cronin & Crawford, 1999a;). In corporate settings, for example, use can be found in discussions of competitor intelligence (Cronin & Crawford, 1999b; McCrohan, 1998) and computer security (Boulanger, 1998; Jajodia et al 1999).

./english/400.txt:10:An important feature of information warfare for this paper is that of resource asymmetry - the ability to inflict substantial damage on a conventionally better equipped adversary (Schwartau, 2000). In general, military conflict has historically been waged by broadly similarly organised and equipped adversaries. Notwithstanding widespread guerrilla campaigns during the 20th Century, the doctrine of deterrence based on largely equivalent, and massive, military capability was a military orthodoxy during the Cold War. Information warfare removes some of the constraints of symmetry, allowing small and relatively ill-equipped groups to confront apparently more powerful conventionally organised and equipped adversaries. The ideal-type of such asymmetric confrontation is perhaps the lone hacker taking advantage of the Internet to infiltrate high-security information systems to cause economic or other damage. A consequence of this asymmetry is the growing significance of non-state actors such as terrorist, criminal or non-governmental organisations as threats to nation states either militarily or economically (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1998a; Cronin & Crawford 1998a; Rathmell, 1998; Schwartau, 2000). Other general features or aspects of information warfare include low-intensity operations, targeting of soft assets, zero warning, increasingly vulnerability as technological sophistication increases, initiative resting with the attacker, the ability of the attacker to vary the frequency and intensity of the attack and the ease with which allies may be mobilised (Cronin & Crawford, 1998a).

./english/400.txt:12:In looking at conflict beyond the purely military, Arquilla and Ronfeldt distinguish several types of information warfare: the term 'cyberwar' is used to refer to military conflict, and 'netwar' is used to describe non-military and societal conflict. 'Social netwar' is distinguished from other social conflicts including 'ethno-nationalist', 'terrorist', and 'criminal' netwar. and is characterised by:

./english/400.txt:14:Importantly, this view of social netwar emphasises organisational and doctrinal dimensions of conflict, rather than simply the immediate role of ICTs (Ronfeldt, 1999).

./english/400.txt:15:The changing nature of industrial conflict

./english/400.txt:19:Thirdly, the use of the strike as a tactic in industrial conflict has been falling in most parts of the world for the last two decades (ILO, 1999). Strikes are not the only tactic used by trade unions in industrial disputes, but they have been the archetypal. tactic over much of the last century and one whose use has diminished substantially across almost all industrialised countries (Leisink et al, 1996).

./english/400.txt:21:Information warfare and industrial conflict

./english/400.txt:22:The following discussion is based on Arquilla and Ronfeldt's (1998a; 1998b) framework to examine trade union strategies in industrial disputes. It is organised around the organisational and tactical characteristics of information warfare highlighted in this framework, and the roles of ICTs as both terrain and weapon/target in industrial conflict. Theoretical issues are identified before a discussion of their relevance both to social movements in general and then to trade union organisation in particular.

./english/400.txt:24:Many effective commercial, terrorist, criminal and social organisations to some extent now display network features, at least in part reliant on the ability to exploit current and emerging ICTs (Castells, 1996; Rathmell, 1998). Arquilla & Ronfeldt (1998a) argue further, that networks are the characteristic organisational form of information warfare and that civil society actors such as NGOs have been particularly adept at using networked organisation to enable more flexible and responsive behaviour. Decentralised networks, exploiting (both old and new) communications technologies, allow small and widely scattered actors to collaborate as required, mobilising their distinctive resources jointly to pursue shared objectives. Arquilla & Ronfeldt (1998a) particularly emphasise the importance of 'all-channel' networks, where all actors are connected to all others (a form of network particularly enabled by contemporary ICTs) and which, they assert, are particularly effective in conflict situations providing both speed and redundancy of communications.

./english/400.txt:29:Transnational networks comprised solely of labour activists may face fundamental problems. Apart from 'elite' actors who operate at transnational levels, most trade unionists remain located in diverse national contexts. Collective action among these nationally-situated actors requires the development of trust, reciprocity and a shared 'cultural learning'. The circumstances in which these can develop may prove to be very limited (Tarrow, 2000). Arquilla & Ronfeldt suggest (1998a) it is not necessarily the case that networked organisation is the only possible mode of organisation in information-intensive conflict, but that mastery of its techniques are essential. The combination of hierarchical and decentralised organisation ultimately may prove to be effective in transnational labour organising: campaigns in support of Guatemalan coffee workers benefitted on the one hand from the rapid transfer of information, decision making and grassroots involvement of workers and other social groups, and on the other hand with the ability to mobilise people and to provide financial and infrastructure resources possible from the more traditionally accountable IUF (Kidder & McGinn, 1995). Similar relationships between centralised hierarchies and decentralised networks can be seen in the apparently decentralised networks of 'new' social movements. For example human rights, issue-based networks may include decentralised organisations linked to local social movements typically concerned with struggling to establish or defend their own human rights, alongside organisations, such as international governmental organisations and private foundations concerned with the defence of others' rights (Sikkink, 1993; Sharpe, 2000). The environmental movement similarly includes organisations such as Greenpeace which has a highly centralised organisation in combination with a decentralised global network of local groups and activists (Castells, 1997).

./english/400.txt:31:Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1998b) have argued that the characteristic strategic approach of information warfare, enabled by information-intensive networked organisation, is that of 'swarming' in which small, dispersed and mobile forces come together rapidly to engage with an adversary before rapidly dissolving. The ability to continue swarming attacks by repeatedly dispersing and coalescing as a series of 'sustainable pulses' becomes the key feature of 'swarm networks'. Swarming in social conflict has a long history - Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1989b) illustrate this with the example of Marx's description of workers and peasants confrontation with state authorities on the streets of Paris in 1848 (Marx 1850; 1959: pp. 281-307). More recent reminders of the continuing significance of physical swarming in social conflict can be found in the case of protests against the World Bank and IMF in Seattle (Financial Times, 1999) and Prague (Anderson, 2000).

./english/400.txt:33:Arquila & Ronfeldt’s information warfare framework suggests that the corporate campaign may prove to be a characteristic strategy for trade unions for two reasons. Firstly, broadening the dispute into the public arena makes it an information-intensive battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Both sides of the conflict engage in campaigns to control what information is available and the meanings that are widely attached to it. Secondly, the approach is network-oriented both in the attempt to mobilise wider networks of social and governmental/regulatory actors (McGuiness, 1996) and in the identification of actors in the corporate adversary’s financial, supply-chain or other networks as legitimate targets.

./english/400.txt:35:The importance of ICTs in social netwar is twofold. Firstly, they provide the communications infrastructure by which networked organisation can be sustained particularly at a transnational level. Secondly, they constitute a terrain on which aspects of social conflicts are played out. Discussion of ICTs and information as terrain is separated here into their related structural and procedural aspects (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1998a). The structural dimension is concerned with ideas and values, and ways in which the Internet and more conventional media provide an arena for 'hearts and minds' battles for wider public support. The information processing aspects are seen more directly in discussions of issues such as denial of service and Internet security.

./english/400.txt:98:This paper has applied some of the concepts of information warfare - particularly as developed in Arquilla and Ronfeldt's (1998a, 1998b) framework to industrial conflict in general, and to the example of Web-based cybercampaigning as carried out by the ICEM in particular.

./english/400.txt:100:Perhaps more important than the use of the Web as a terrain are the relation of ICTs to union organisation. ICT and cheap travel have enabled more effective co-ordination of networked 'real world' responses in at least two of the campaigns, where speaking tours have built support among unions international for those unions direct involved in conflict. Ultimately, in the two campaigns (A&D) which have reached clear-cut resolution, the local demonstrations and pickets and demonstrations of wider trade union support appear to have been much more significant than the cybercampaigns. The cybercampaigns are perhaps better seen as a relatively low-cost form of corporate campaigning, raising the profile of a dispute particularly among Internet-using labour activists and in some cases also the mainstream media. These disputes did to some extent exhibit physical and virtual 'swarming' behaviour as distributed actors came together to act during the dispute, without forming a specific and enduring organisational structure.

./english/400.txt:104:The information warfare framework used has provided a valuable framework for examining international labour campaigning in general and the use of ICT in particular. In both the general discussion and the particular case studies it has highlighted the role of the network as an organisational form and 'swarming' - both virtual and physical - as tactics in conflict situations.

./english/400.txt:105:It highlights a number of areas which will benefit from future research, in particular the conception of the Internet as a terrain for social conflict. In the industrial relations setting, this includes collective bargaining and workplace ICT access and union use of ICT in the organisation and preparation of industrial disputes.

./english/400.txt:110:Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D. (1998a) Preparing for Information-Age Conflict: Part 1 Conceptual and organizational dimensions, Information, Communication & Society 1(1) pp. 1-22

./english/400.txt:111:Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D. (1998b) Preparing for Information-Age Conflict: Part 2 Doctrinal and strategic dimensions, Information, Communication & Society 1(2) pp. 121-143

./english/400.txt:112:Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D. (1999) "The Advent of Netwar: Analytic Background", Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 22(3) pp.193-296

./english/400.txt:125:Danitz, T. & Strobel, W. (1999) The Internet’s Impact on Activism: The Case of Burma, Studies in Conflict in Terrorism 22(3) pp. 257-279

./english/400.txt:167:Ronfeldt, D. (1999) Netwar Across Spectrum of Conflict: An Introductory Comment, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 22(3), pp189-92

./english/401.txt:50:We think it important…not to forget the utopian tendencies that have always accompanied the progression toward globalization, even if these tendencies have continually been defeated by the powers of modern sovereignty. The love of differences and the belief in the universal freedom and equality of humanity proper to the revolutionary thought of Renaissance humanism reappear here on a global scale. This utopian element of globalization is what prevents us from simply falling back into particularism and isolationism in reaction to the totalizing forces of imperialism and racist domination, pushing us instead to forge a project of counterglobalization, counter-Empire. This utopian moment, however, has never been unambiguous. It is a tendency that constantly conflicts with sovereign order and domination. (Hardt and Negri 2000:115)

./english/401.txt:126:Mello e Silva/Brazil and Mercosur. MeS focuses on the possibility of a new working-class internationalism in relation to the cross-national union activities within the developing common market in the Southern Cone of Latin America, the Mercosur. Here he focuses primarily upon the case of Brazil and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT, or United Workers Center). He considers the role played by unions there, as an agent of democratization, and of the conflicts that arose as their institutional practices became more radical and general. These national union practices, he argues, actually undermine the classical labor movement dichotomies - defensive/offensive, reformist/ revolutionary, negotiation-oriented/mobilization-oriented (as well, he suggests, as national/international). MeS extends his argument to the regional and then to the hemispheric level, suggesting that the globalization of union contacts between Northern and Southern regional blocks could prove more an opportunity for, than an obstacle to, internationalism by helping to overcome the corporatist and authoritarian culture deeply rooted in Latin American labor movements. Combined with such internationalism is the possibility of a new relationship between the union movement and social movements, this reinforcing the emancipatory potential within the world of work.

./english/401.txt:132:MeS recognizes, however, that the other regional agreements within the Western hemisphere (and within which unions have been attempting to carve out a space and make an impact), such as the North American Free Trade Area, not only differ in form and coverage, but can lead to accords which conflict with each other. It is this that leads him to conclude that:

./english/401.txt:134:at least in principle, there would be no incompatibility between the pro-social movement position coming from the North and the union practices of the CUT. On the contrary, cross-contamination between the two cultures could instill radicalism among other changes greatly desired by the most dynamic nucleus of Brazilian syndicalism [unionsm – PW]. The fact that there has been more than a little resistance to the influence of unions in Mercosur forums demonstrates that the manner in which those actors have tried to address problems related to regional integration has been conflictual and creative at the same time. Finally, to acknowledge that the possibility of a working-class internationalism has its problems does not mean that it is doomed to failure. The challenge of trying could bring new meaning to an old and celebrated call.

./english/401.txt:156:Romero/Bananeros in Colombia. Romero's paper is about banana workers in an isolated region of north-western Colombia, on the border with Panama. It is primarily concerned with the self-transformation of the workers there from 'subjects to citizens'. Robero recognizes that Urabá represents an odd case, in so far as the citizenship relates not so much to the national as the local state, and then to a political arena from which the insurrectionary left has been more or less eliminated and in which counter-insurgent vigilantes have consolidated their power. If the bananeros have nonetheless – along with the post-insurrectionary left - established themselves within the region, this is because of 1) the perceived threat posed to both local capital and labor by the still-insurrectionary FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), 2) regional interests in relation to the central state, and even 3) the role played by the Presidential Peace Commission. The conflict between the armed left and the political left for the loyalty of the bananeros seems to have been won by the latter. The local elite has been prepared to give recognition to the union and the political left in exchange for some protection of the local economy and polity from the FARC.

./english/403.txt:17:Conflict as the moment of identity, as ‘the’ moment of constitution, of politics, of class constitution … this for me is a forced understanding. Amongst other things, this conception still attributes great value to visibility. The ‘other’, in order to be such, must be visible, manifest, and the more clamorous the conflict, the greater the identity it confers … This is the back door through which the traditional logic of politics is returned to play. I prefer the image of beams eaten from within by termites, I prefer a non-visible, non-spectacular path, the idea of the silent growth of a body that is foreign to the sort of visibility that leaves you hostage to the universe of mediation (Borio, Pozzi & Roggero 2001: 14).

./english/403.txt:75:In other words, Nowé returns us to the same problems raised amongst others by Neill (1997a and b), Har and Hutnyk (1999). Like them, she freely admits that for now, such problems remain unresolved, while arguing that information flows within social movements that aspire to self-managed organisational practices may well conflict with what knowledge management as a discipline would deem to be ‘a rational decision making procedure’.

./english/409.txt:63:Some of this criticism was unfair. The forum accommodated an extraordinary range of views, and it was precisely this diversity that made conflicts inevitable. By bringing together groups with such different ideas about power--unions, political parties, NGOs, anarchist street protesters and agrarian reformers--the World Social Forum only made visible the tensions that are always just under the surface of these fragile coalitions.

./english/417.txt:46:  Internal conflicts within and difficulties for the committee were conferred upon the

./english/417.txt:151:necessarily and so that conflicting point of views/disagreements/different motifs become visi-

./english/417.txt:331: so necessarily and so that conflicting points of view/disagreements/different motifs

./english/512.txt:18:- war and the militarization of conflicts;

./english/522.txt:34:Muslim identity is not necessarily above all religious. It can be nationalist and cultural as seems for example to have traditionally been the case for the (regional) national movement in Sind. But the Pakistani state is constituted with a confessional reference base. A policy of official Islamisation was subsequently pursued, in particular by the military dictatorship of general Zia which made Islam a state ideology. But Islam being very diverse in Pakistan, that has exacerbated the “sectarian” conflicts between Muslims. The experience of the Karachi WSF allows us to perceive, in such a context, the centrality of the secular demand, a necessary condition for the realisation of the social unity of the exploited and the oppressed divided by the religious reference.

./english/522.txt:61:2. The significance of the Pakistani experience. The Karachi forum illustrates this first point of conclusion. The political situation in the country is not good. There are key struggles, sometimes victorious, but the trade union and social movement remains fragmented and globally weak. The country is extremely divided. Social structures are often very different according to province, or even inside the same province like the Punjab. The whole history of the Pakistani state since its formation in 1947 is traversed by conflicts between the elites of “ethnic” groups and provinces for the control of the administration and the army (which are dominated by the Punjabis, but also the Mohajirs). Regional or national conflicts are numerous (Baluchis, Pashtoons, Kashmiris, Sindhis and so on) and can lead to internal wars. Statistics show 97% of Pakistan’s population are Muslims, with all the ambiguity linked to the use of categories of religious (or cultural?) appearance against a complex social reality (don’t doubt it, there are Pakistani atheists). But we have seen the multiplicity (Sunni, Shiite, Ahmadiyya, Sufis and so on) and the violence that this “unanimous” percentage hides.

./english/522.txt:77:The forum in Karachi was made possible by this world expansion of the process; in return it gives it dynamism in a country and a zone of strategic conflicts. A sole regret: that too few organisations in Europe and Latin America took this opportunity to acquaint themselves with the stakes in South Asia.

./english/527.txt:16:When 1400 organisations from all over the world gather to organise more than 2000 seminars, one might expect the media to be there. Surely, one could say that the mainstream media are part of the problems that are discussed at the fora, since they are dominated by neoliberal capitalism. Nevertheless, even the World Economic Forum in Davos got little attention and even alternative media were not massively present in Caracas. End of January 2006, all media focused on some Danish islamophobic cartoons. So, one necessarily has to question recent developments. What exactly is going on? Have the World Social Fora become irrelevant? Are today’s world’s real conflicts not situated elsewhere? Do the World Social Fora mirror the world’s most urgent problems?

./english/527.txt:96:Finally, it could be interesting to try and make a synthesis of all debates. Concerning the most relevant issues for ‘another world’, most things have been said or have been written, but no one ever tried to bring all ideas together into a coherent programme. Who can pretend that no consensus will ever be possible at all? And if we do not need a blueprint for one specific type of world, why not three, four or five different programmes that can be discussed within the open space the WSF can continue to be? This does not conflict with the principles of the charter. It could significantly improve the convergence and the strength of the movement.

./english/527.txt:98:The discussion on the future of the movement has now started and that is a very positive result. However, binary dichotomies can better be avoided, like civil society vs the state, local vs global action, etc. The main challenge consists in finding the right way of linking different levels and different agents. There are no political levels or agents that can be neglected. A political dialogue does not conflict with the autonomy of movements. We should not fall into the trap that neoliberal discourses are setting for us. WSF could usefully consult the feminist movement that has some experience with the re-invention of democracy. For the WSF, gender is a transversal issue, though women, their experiences and their issues are under-represented. Concerning issues as pluralism and diversity, their contribution could be very useful.

./english/532.txt:21:The values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may [...] prove quite applicable to the broader challenges of our time and help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems [...] One model for the open-ended and participatory process through which legislation might occur in a networked democracy can be found in the open source software movement.[7]

./english/535.txt:18:But, representatives at the WSF from NGO’s working within Haiti see things differently. According to a report from one workshop, anti-Aristide participants disrupted a question and answer period by refusing to give up the microphone as they attacked the Aristide government as being illegitimate. Some of these NGO’s receive funding from conservative US interests (with ties to the CIA) and are seen as undermining legitimate solidarity efforts both in Haiti and at the WSF. There is a clear conflict of interest between the NGO participants who attempt to foster good relations with the (illegitimate) Haitian government and those from grassroots organizations who oppose the coup and are struggling to build a more just society.

./english/571.txt:61:Political parties emerged in modern Europe and Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although there were parties of opinion and cliques in the ancient city-communities of Hellas, the metaphor of body politic dominated political imagination until early European modernity. The idea was that in one organism or body, it is not healthy to have conflicts or contradictions. Organised political parties were invented only when this metaphor was replaced with the individualist idea of social contract (see Ball 1988). The idea of a party representing the universal interests of humanity also emerged in the 19th century, which led, after the Russian revolution of 1917, to the construction of totalitarian one-party states. During and since the Cold War, the model of polyarchy (competitive elitism) has prevailed in the West.

./english/605.txt:23:India is mostly hinduist (82%), but includes an Islamic minority (12%) and 19 million Christians, 18 million Sikhs, 7 million Buddhist, 4 million jainists and people expressing other beliefs. Communalist conflicts (specially resulting of the persecution against muslims) have raised, stimulated by the nationalist hinduist streams, which since 1998 control central government and keep a militarist and nuclear policy towards Pakistan and China. One of them, Shiv Sena (Shivaji Army), rules Mumbai since 1985 and shares the government of Maharashtra since 1995, with the reactionary Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP – which also controls the central government. It was BJP´s government in Gujarat state that allowed the killing of 2,000 muslims by fanatic hinduist in March 2002.

./english/605.txt:30:The most visible conflicts in Indian society come from the complex system of casts associated to Hinduism – put very plainly, it is believed that if an individual follows the duties of his cast, that increases the chances of rebirthing in a superior cast and in better circumstances. The situation is particularly unsustainable for more than 200 million dalits (formerly known as “untouchable”) who integrate the inferior cast. They are discriminated in every circuit of the society and are spread in dozens of different movements.

./english/605.txt:81:Mumbai has enriched the WSF agenda and integrated new and important forces in the process. But also reinforced the will of the Forum being a new and more useful tool to multiply political action and moving current correlation of forces. The more the neoliberalism seems sold out, the more this aspiration nourishes. At last, the Forum is not an end in itself, but a mean so what thousands of movements in the world can articulate and strengthen their struggles. And in Mumbai, with the consolidation of the Forum in the most conflictive and populated zone of the planet, this will has gained a sense of emergency. That has expressed in several critical discussions and self-criticism among the process protagonists, who point the need of changing directions towards Porto Alegre 2005. What balance can be made today about the Forum´s role in motivating our alternatives?

./english/646.txt:112:Internal politics in the WSF has often been played out in the space different groups have been given during the main annual events. In the first forum, racial tensions created some internal conflict. Brazil may don the public face of racial harmony during Carnival or the (soccer) World Cup, but racism is present in most walks of life, including progressive intellectuals’ ranks. For many observers, both forums have been surprisingly “white” events due not only to the lack of large delegations from Africa, Asia and other parts of Latin America, but also to the fact that the average Brazilian participating in the forum is clearly “whiter” than the average Brazilian. (Rio Grande do Sul is one of the rare parts of Brazil, Latin America and the whole ‘third world’ where many locals are light-skinned people of European, including Germanic, origin.)

./english/668.txt:9:While last year 15,000 people showed up, this year, all told more than 51,000 people from 131 countries officially participated in the World Social Forum. In the virtual realm, the WSF website found itself hosting another half million visitors a day. Overall, the event was extremely well organized, with barely any noticeable glitches or conflicts.Tens of Thousands in the Streets -- PeacefullyIn contrast with the streets of New York City -- or for that matter Seattle, Prague or Genoa -- police presence in Porto Alegre was once again nearly non-existent as huge marches peacefully wound through the street. The opening ceremony saw more than 40,000 people demonstrating. The anti-FTAA protest, held on the final day, gathered about 10,000. The beautiful and inspiring closing ceremony, held in a giant hall at the main venue -- the beautifully appointed Catholic University -- was packed with a diverse group of 6,000 people; it was simulcast to thousands more at two other venues.This being a left-political gathering in the heart of Latin America, Che Guevara was everywhere.

./english/668.txt:11:And this being the beginning of the 21st century, his most-marketable non-trademarked image was for sale in nearly half of the hundreds of vendors stalls. There were Che books, Che t-shirts, Che CDs, Che baseball caps, Che posters, Che flags, and even little-mini bottles of Che cacaca -- the local cane alcohol drink. By contrast, despite the anti-US government sentiment of most of the meeting, images of Osama bin Laden were nowhere to be found, neither in the vendors stalls nor the meeting halls. Anti-fundamentalism and pluralism were the themes of the day.There was also a plethora of music every day in a makeshift amphitheater, all night concerts, and stirring speeches by the stars of the anti-corporate globalization movement Walden Bello, Martin Khor and Naomi Klein, by venerated leftists like Noam Chomsky and Brazils Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva, as well as by Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.Both the "war on terror" and Israeli-Palestinian conflict figured prominently in a multi-day session entitled "A World Without Wars is Possible." The Argentine economic debacle was hotly debated in many a venue, and the scandalous demise of the Enron corporation was high on the agenda. There was a World Youth Congress.

./english/671.txt:6:The first and dominant impression of the Forum was its overflowing enormity; not so much the number of people therethe organizers say 80,000 participatedbut rather the number of events, encounters and happenings. The programme listing all the official conferences, seminars and workshopsmost of which took place at the Catholic Universitywas the size of a tabloid newspaper, but one soon realized that there were innumerable other unofficial meetings taking place all over town, some publicized on posters and leaflets, others by word of mouth. There were also separate gatherings for the different groups participating in the Forum, such as a meeting of the Italian social movements or one for the various national sections of ATTAC. Then there were the demonstrations: both officially planned, such as the opening mass May Day-style parade, and smaller, conflictual demonstrations against, for example, the members of parliament from different countries at the Forum who voted for the present war on terrorism. Finally, another series of events was held at the enormous youth camp by the river, its fields and fields of tents housing 15,000 people in an atmosphere reminiscent of a summer music festival, especially when it rained and everyone tramped through the mud wearing plastic sacks as raincoats. In short, if anyone with obsessive tendencies were to try to understand what was happening at Porto Alegre, the result would certainly have been a complete mental breakdown. The Forum was unknowable, chaotic, dispersive. And that overabundance created an exhilaration in everyone, at being lost in a sea of people from so many parts of the world who are working similarly against the present form of capitalist globalization.

./english/671.txt:10:The encounter should, however, reveal and address not only the common projects and desires, but also the differences of those involveddifferences of material conditions and political orientation. The various movements across the globe cannot simply connect to each other as they are, but must rather be transformed by the encounter through a kind of mutual adequation. Those from North America and Europe, for example, cannot but have been struck by the contrast between their experience and that of agricultural labourers and the rural poor in Brazil, represented most strongly by the MST (Landless Movement)and vice versa. What kind of transformations are necessary for the Euro-American globalization movements and the Latin American movements, not to become the same, or even to unite, but to link together in an expanding common network? The Forum provided an opportunity to recognize such differences and questions for those willing to see them, but it did not provide the conditions for addressing them. In fact, the very same dispersive, overflowing quality of the Forum that created the euphoria of commonality also effectively displaced the terrain on which such differences and conflicts could be confronted.

./english/671.txt:13:The Porto Alegre Forum was in this sense perhaps too happy, too celebratory and not conflictual enough. The most important political difference cutting across the entire Forum concerned the role of national sovereignty. There are indeed two primary positions in the response to todays dominant forces of globalization: either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization that is equally global. The first poses neoliberalism as the primary analytical category, viewing the enemy as unrestricted global capitalist activity with weak state controls; the second is more clearly posed against capital itself, whether state-regulated or not. The first might rightly be called an anti-globalization position, in so far as national sovereignties, even if linked by international solidarity, serve to limit and regulate the forces of capitalist globalization. National liberation thus remains for this position the ultimate goal, as it was for the old anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The second, in contrast, opposes any national solutions and seeks instead a democratic globalization.

./english/671.txt:19:The division between the sovereignty, anti-globalization position and the non-sovereign, alternative globalization position is therefore not best understood in geographical terms. It does not map the divisions between North and South or First World and Third. The conflict corresponds rather to two different forms of political organization. The traditional parties and centralized campaigns generally occupy the national sovereignty pole, whereas the new movements organized in horizontal networks tend to cluster at the non-sovereign pole. And furthermore, within traditional, centralized organizations, the top tends toward sovereignty and the base away. It is no surprise, perhaps, that those in positions of power would be most interested in state sovereignty and those excluded least. This may help to explain, in any case, how the national sovereignty, anti-globalization position could dominate the representations of the Forum even though the majority of the participants tend rather toward the perspective of a non-national alternative globalization.

./english/671.txt:24:In a previous period we could have staged an old-style ideological confrontation between the two positions. The first could accuse the second of playing into the hands of neoliberalism, undermining state sovereignty and paving the way for further globalization. Politics, the one could continue, can only be effectively conducted on the national terrain and within the nation-state. And the second could reply that national regimes and other forms of sovereignty, corrupt and oppressive as they are, are merely obstacles to the global democracy that we seek. This kind of confrontation, however, could not take place at Porto Alegrein part because of the dispersive nature of the event, which tended to displace conflicts, and in part because the sovereignty position so successfully occupied the central representations that no contest was possible.

./english/671.txt:28:Like the Forum itself, the multitude in the movements is always overflowing, excessive and unknowable. It is certainly important then, on the one hand, to recognize the differences that divide the activists and politicians gathered at Porto Alegre. It would be a mistake, on the other hand, to try to read the division according to the traditional model of ideological conflict between opposing sides. Political struggle in the age of network movements no longer works that way. Despite the apparent strength of those who occupied centre stage and dominated the representations of the Forum, they may ultimately prove to have lost the struggle. Perhaps the representatives of the traditional parties and centralized organizations at Porto Alegre are too much like the old national leaders gathered at Bandungimagine Lula of the PT in the position of Ahmed Sukarno as host, and Bernard Cassen of ATTAC France as Jawaharlal Nehru, the most honoured guest. The leaders can certainly craft resolutions affirming national sovereignty around a conference table, but they can never grasp the democratic power of the movements. Eventually they too will be swept up in the multitude, which is capable of transforming all fixed and centralized elements into so many more nodes in its indefinitely expansive network.